Delay Systems

The beginning of the 21st century can be characterized as the” time-delay boom” leading to numerous important results. The purpose of this book is two-fold, to familiarize the non-expert reader with time-delay systems and to provide a systematic treatment of modern ideas and techniques for experts. This book is based on the course ”Introduction to time-delay systems” for graduate students in Engineering and Applied Mathematics that the author taught in Tel Aviv University in 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 academic years. The sufficient background to follow most of the material are the undergraduate courses in mathematics and an introduction to control. The book leads the reader from some basic classical results on time-delay systems to recent developments on Lyapunov-based analysis and design with applications to the hot topics of sampled-data and network-based control. The objective is to provide useful tools that will allow the reader not only to apply the existing methods, but also to develop new ones. It should be of interest for researchers working in the field, for graduate students in engineering and applied mathematics, and for practicing engineers. It may also be used as a textbook for a graduate course on time-delay systems.

Stability is one of the most studied issues in the theory of time-delay systems, however the corresponding chapters of published volumes on time-delay systems do not include a comprehensive study of a counterpart of classical Lyapunov theory for linear delay free systems. The principal goal of the book is to fill this gap, and to provide readers with a systematic and exhaustive treatment of the basic concepts of the Lyapunov-Krasovskii approach to the stability analysis of linear time-delay systems.​ Time-Delay Systems: Lyapunov Functionals and Matrices​ will be of great use and interest to researchers and graduate students in automatic control and applied mathematics as well as practicing engineers involved in control system design.​

One of the major contemporary challenges in both physical and social sciences is modeling, analyzing, and understanding the self-organization, evolution, behavior, and eventual decay of complex dynamical systems ranging from cell assemblies to the human brain to animal societies. The multi-faceted problems in this domain require a wide range of methods from various scienti?c disciplines. There is no question that the inclusion of time delays in complex system models considerably enriches the challenges presented by the problems. Although this inclusion often becomes inevitable as real-world applications demand more and more realistic m- els, the role of time delays in the context of complex systems so far has not attracted the interest it deserves. The present volume is an attempt toward ?lling this gap. There exist various useful tools for the study of complex time-delay systems. At the forefront is the mathematical theory of delay equations, a relatively mature ?eld in many aspects, which provides some powerful techniques for analytical inquiries, along with some other tools from statistical physics, graph theory, computer science, dynamical systems theory, probability theory, simulation and optimization software, and so on. Nevertheless, the use of these methods requires a certain synergy to address complex systems problems, especially in the presence of time delays.

This book is a self-contained presentation of the background and progress of the study of time-delay systems, a subject with broad applications to a number of areas.

This book provides an update of the latest research in control of time delay systems and applications by world leading experts. It will appeal to engineers, researchers and students in Control.

Synchronization of chaotic systems, a patently nonlinear phenomenon, has emerged as a highly active interdisciplinary research topic at the interface of physics, biology, applied mathematics and engineering sciences. In this connection, time-delay systems described by delay differential equations have developed as particularly suitable tools for modeling specific dynamical systems. Indeed, time-delay is ubiquitous in many physical systems, for example due to finite switching speeds of amplifiers in electronic circuits, finite lengths of vehicles in traffic flows, finite signal propagation times in biological networks and circuits, and quite generally whenever memory effects are relevant. This monograph presents the basics of chaotic time-delay systems and their synchronization with an emphasis on the effects of time-delay feedback which give rise to new collective dynamics. Special attention is devoted to scalar chaotic/hyperchaotic time-delay systems, and some higher order models, occurring in different branches of science and technology as well as to the synchronization of their coupled versions. Last but not least, the presentation as a whole strives for a balance between the necessary mathematical description of the basics and the detailed presentation of real-world applications.

In many practical applications we deal with a wide class of dynamical systems that are comprised of a family of continuous-time or discrete-time subsystems and a rule orchestrating the switching between the subsystems. This class of systems is frequently called switched system. Switched linear systems provide a framework that bridges the linear systems and the complex and/or uncertain systems. The mo- vation for investigating this class of systems is twofold: ?rst, it has an inherent multi-modal behavior in the sense that several dynamical subsystems are required to describe their behavior, which might depend on various environmental factors. Second, the methods of intelligent control systems are based on the idea of swit- ing between different controllers. Looked at in this light, switched systems provide an integral framework to deal with complex system behaviors such as chaos and multiple limit cycles and gain more insights into powerful tools such as intelligent control, adaptive control, and robust control. Switched systems have been inves- gated for a long time in the control and systems literature and have increasingly attracted more attention for the past three decades. The number of journal articles, books, and conference papers have grown exponentially and a number of fundam- tal concepts and powerful tools have been developed. It has been pointed out that switched systems have been studied from various viewpoints.

"Stability Analysis and Robust Control of Time-Delay Systems" focuses on essential aspects of this field, including the stability analysis, stabilization, control design, and filtering of various time-delay systems. Primarily based on the most recent research, this monograph presents all the above areas using a free-weighting matrix approach first developed by the authors. The effectiveness of this method and its advantages over other existing ones are proven theoretically and illustrated by means of various examples. The book will give readers an overview of the latest advances in this active research area and equip them with a pioneering method for studying time-delay systems. It will be of significant interest to researchers and practitioners engaged in automatic control engineering. Prof. Min Wu, senior member of the IEEE, works at the Central South University, China.