Containment Control for a Social Network with State-Dependent Connectivity Zhen Kan, Justin Klotz, Eduardo L. Pasiliao Jr, Warren E. Dixon 1. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA 2. Air Force Research Laboratory, Munitions Directorate, Eglin AFB, FL 32542, USA. Abstract: Social interactions influence our thoughts, opinions and actions. In this paper, social interactions are studied within a group of individuals composed of influential social leaders and followers. Each person is assumed to maintain a social state, which can be an emotional state or an opinion. Followers update their social states based on the states of local neighbors, while social leaders maintain a constant desired state. Social interactions are modeled as a general directed graph where each directed edge represents an influence from one person to another. Motivated by the non-local property of fractional-order systems, the social response of individuals in the network are modeled by fractional-order dynamics whose states depend on influences from local neighbors and past experiences. A decentralized influence method is then developed to maintain existing social influence between individuals (e.g., without isolating peers in the group) and to influence the social group to a common desired state (e.g., within a convex hull spanned by social leaders). Mittag-Leffler stability methods are used to prove asymptotic stability of the networked fractional-order system. arxiv.org/pdf/1402.5644.pdf