Time delays are important components of many systems in, for instance, engineering, physics, economics, and the life sciences, because the transfer of material, energy, and information is usually not instantaneous. Time delays may appear as computation and communication lags, they model transport phenomena and heredity, and they arise as feedback delays in control loops. This monograph addresses the problem of stability analysis, stabilization, and robust fixed-order control of dynamical systems subject to delays, including both retarded- and neutral-type systems. Within the eigenvalue-based framework, an overall solution is given to the stability analysis, stabilization, and robust control design problem, using both analytical methods and numerical algorithms and applicable to a broad class of linear time-delay systems.? In this revised edition, the authors make the leap from stabilization to the design of robust and optimal controllers and from retarded-type to neutral-type delay systems, thus enlarging the scope of the book within control; include new, state-of-the-art material on numerical methods and algorithms to broaden the book?s focus and to reach additional research communities, in particular numerical linear algebra and numerical optimization; and increase the number and range of applications to better illustrate the effectiveness and generality of their approach.?

An overall solution to the (robust) stability analysis and stabilisation problem of linear time-delay systems.

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.

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.

Although the last decade has witnessed significant advances in control theory for finite and infinite dimensional systems, the stability and control of time-delay systems have not been fully investigated. Many problems exist in this field that are still unresolved, and there is a tendency for the numerical methods available either to be too general or too specific to be applied accurately across a range of problems. This monograph brings together the latest trends and new results in this field, with the aim of presenting methods covering a large range of techniques. Particular emphasis is placed on methods that can be directly applied to specific problems. The resulting book is one that will be of value to both researchers and practitioners.

This book presents the recently introduced and already widely referred semi-discretization method for the stability analysis of delayed dynamical systems. Delay differential equations often come up in different fields of engineering, like feedback control systems, machine tool vibrations, balancing/stabilization with reflex delay. The behavior of such systems is often counter-intuitive and closed form analytical formulas can rarely be given even for the linear stability conditions. If parametric excitation is coupled with the delay effect, then the governing equation is a delay differential equation with time periodic coefficients, and the stability properties are even more intriguing. The semi-discretization method is a simple but efficient method that is based on the discretization with respect to the delayed term and the periodic coefficients only. The method can effectively be used to construct stability diagrams in the space of system parameters.

Time-delay occurs in many physical, industrial and engineering systems such as biological systems, chemical systems, metallurgical processing systems, nuclear reactors, hydraulic systems and electrical networks, to name a few. The reason for the occurrence could be attributed to inherent physical phenomena like mass transport flow or recycling. It could result from the finite capabilities of information processing and data transmission among various parts of the system. In addition, they could be by-products of computational delays or could be intentionally introduced for some design consideration. Such delays could be constant or time varying, known or unknown, deterministic or stochastic depending on the system under consideration. In recent years, time-delay, which exists in networked control systems, has brought more complex problems into a new research area. Frequently, it is a source of the generation of oscillation, instability and poor performance. Therefore, the subject of Time-Delay Systems (TDS) has been investigated as functional differential equations over the past four decades. Because the presence of the delay factor renders the system analysis more complicated, the problems of stability and stabilization are of great importance. This book presents some basic theories of stability and stabilization of systems with time-delays. More attention is paid to the synthesis of systems with time-delay. That is, control of nonlinear systems with delay; networked control systems; positive delay systems; fuzzy systems; and reset control with random delay are all analysed within this book.