Oscillations in I/O monotone systems under negative feedback

Oscillatory behavior is a key property of many biological systems. The Small-Gain Theorem (SGT) for input/output monotone systems provides a sufficient condition for global asymptotic stability of an equilibrium and hence its violation is a necessary condition for the existence of periodic solutions. One advantage of the use of the monotone SGT technique is its robustness with respect to all perturbations that preserve monotonicity and stability properties of a very low-dimensional (in many interesting examples, just one-dimensional) model reduction. This robustness makes the technique useful in the analysis of molecular biological models in which there is large uncertainty regarding the values of kinetic and other parameters. However, verifying the conditions needed in order to apply the SGT is not always easy. This paper provides an approach to the verification of the needed properties, and illustrates the approach through an application to a classical model of circadian oscillations, as a nontrivial ``case study,'' and also provides a theorem in the converse direction of predicting oscillations when the SGT conditions fail.Comment: Related work can be retrieved from second author's websit

Discrete-time recurrent neural networks with time-varying delays: Exponential stability analysis

This is the post print version of the article. The official published version can be obtained from the link below - Copyright 2007 Elsevier LtdThis Letter is concerned with the analysis problem of exponential stability for a class of discrete-time recurrent neural networks (DRNNs) with time delays. The delay is of the time-varying nature, and the activation functions are assumed to be neither differentiable nor strict monotonic. Furthermore, the description of the activation functions is more general than the recently commonly used Lipschitz conditions. Under such mild conditions, we first prove the existence of the equilibrium point. Then, by employing a Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, a unified linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach is developed to establish sufficient conditions for the DRNNs to be globally exponentially stable. It is shown that the delayed DRNNs are globally exponentially stable if a certain LMI is solvable, where the feasibility of such an LMI can be easily checked by using the numerically efficient Matlab LMI Toolbox. A simulation example is presented to show the usefulness of the derived LMI-based stability condition.This work was supported in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Nuffield Foundation of the UK under Grant NAL/00630/G, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Education Committee of China (05KJB110154), the NSF of Jiangsu Province of China (BK2006064), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (10471119)

Time-and event-driven communication process for networked control systems: A survey

Copyright © 2014 Lei Zou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.In recent years, theoretical and practical research topics on networked control systems (NCSs) have gained an increasing interest from many researchers in a variety of disciplines owing to the extensive applications of NCSs in practice. In particular, an urgent need has arisen to understand the effects of communication processes on system performances. Sampling and protocol are two fundamental aspects of a communication process which have attracted a great deal of research attention. Most research focus has been on the analysis and control of dynamical behaviors under certain sampling procedures and communication protocols. In this paper, we aim to survey some recent advances on the analysis and synthesis issues of NCSs with different sampling procedures (time-and event-driven sampling) and protocols (static and dynamic protocols). First, these sampling procedures and protocols are introduced in detail according to their engineering backgrounds as well as dynamic natures. Then, the developments of the stabilization, control, and filtering problems are systematically reviewed and discussed in great detail. Finally, we conclude the paper by outlining future research challenges for analysis and synthesis problems of NCSs with different communication processes.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61329301, 61374127, and 61374010, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Hybrid Petri net model of a traffic intersection in an urban network

Control in urban traffic networks constitutes an important and challenging research topic nowadays. In the literature, a lot of work can be found devoted to improving the performance of the traffic flow in such systems, by means of controlling the red-to-green switching times of traffic signals. Different techniques have been proposed and commercially implemented, ranging from heuristic methods to model-based optimization. However, given the complexity of the dynamics and the scale of urban traffic networks, there is still a lot of scope for improvement. In this work, a new hybrid model for the traffic behavior at an intersection is introduced. It captures important aspects of the flow dynamics in urban networks. It is shown how this model can be used in order to obtain control strategies that improve the flow of traffic at intersections, leading to the future possibility of controlling several connected intersections in a distributed way

Stochastic stability of uncertain Hopfield neural networks with discrete and distributed delays

This is the post print version of the article. The official published version can be obtained from the link below - Copyright 2006 Elsevier Ltd.This Letter is concerned with the global asymptotic stability analysis problem for a class of uncertain stochastic Hopfield neural networks with discrete and distributed time-delays. By utilizing a Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, using the well-known S-procedure and conducting stochastic analysis, we show that the addressed neural networks are robustly, globally, asymptotically stable if a convex optimization problem is feasible. Then, the stability criteria are derived in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), which can be effectively solved by some standard numerical packages. The main results are also extended to the multiple time-delay case. Two numerical examples are given to demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed global stability condition.This work was supported in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Nuffield Foundation of the UK under Grant NAL/00630/G, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Mathematical control of complex systems 2013

Mathematical control of complex systems have already become an ideal research area for control engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, and biologists to understand, manage, analyze, and interpret functional information/dynamical behaviours from real-world complex dynamical systems, such as communication systems, process control, environmental systems, intelligent manufacturing systems, transportation systems, and structural systems. This special issue aims to bring together the latest/innovative knowledge and advances in mathematics for handling complex systems. Topics include, but are not limited to the following: control systems theory (behavioural systems, networked control systems, delay systems, distributed systems, infinite-dimensional systems, and positive systems); networked control (channel capacity constraints, control over communication networks, distributed filtering and control, information theory and control, and sensor networks); and stochastic systems (nonlinear filtering, nonparametric methods, particle filtering, partial identification, stochastic control, stochastic realization, system identification)