  The paper considers the consensus problem in large networks represented by
time-varying directed graphs. A practical way of dealing with large-scale
networks is to reduce their dimension by collapsing the states of nodes
belonging to densely and intensively connected clusters into aggregate
variables. It will be shown that under suitable conditions, the states of the
agents in each cluster converge fast toward a local agreement. Local agreements
correspond to aggregate variables which slowly converge to consensus. Existing
results concerning the time-scale separation in large networks focus on fixed
and undirected graphs. The aim of this work is to extend these results to the
more general case of time-varying directed topologies. It is noteworthy that in
the fixed and undirected graph case the average of the states in each cluster
is time-invariant when neglecting the interactions between clusters. Therefore,
they are good candidates for the aggregate variables. This is no longer
possible here. Instead, we find suitable time-varying weights to compute the
aggregate variables as time-invariant weighted averages of the states in each
cluster. This allows to deal with the more challenging time-varying directed
graph case. We end up with a singularly perturbed system which is analyzed by
using the tools of two time-scales averaging which seem appropriate to this
system.
