Synchronization of complex dynamical networks with fractional order

Complex dynamical networks (CDN) can be applied to many areas in real world, from medicine, biology, Internet to sociology. Study on CDNs has drawn great attention in recent years. Nodes in a CDN can be modelled as systems represented by differential equations. Study has shown that fractional order differential equations (DF) can better represent some real world systems than integer-order DFs. This research work focuses on synchronization in fractional CDNs.  A literature review on CDNs with fractional order has summarized the latest works in this area.  Fractional chaotic systems are studied in our initial investigation.  Fractional calculus is introduced and the relevant fundamentals to model, describe and analyse dynamical networks are presented. It is shown that the structure and topological characteristics of a network can have a big impact on its synchronizability. Synchronizability and its various interpretations in dynamical networks are studied. To synchronize a CDN efficiently, controllers are generally needed. Controller design is one of the main tasks in this research. Our first design is a new sliding mode control to synchronize a dynamical network with two nodes. Its stability has been proven and verified by simulations.  Its convergence speed outperforms Vaidyanathan's scheme, a well-recognized scheme in this area. The design can be generalized to CDNs with more nodes.  As many applications can be modelled as CDNs with node clustering, a different sliding mode control is designed for cluster synchronization of a CDN with fractional order. Its stability is proven by using Lyapunov method. Its convergence and efficiency is shown in a simulation. Besides these nonlinear methods mentioned, linear control is also studied intensively for the synchronization.  A novel linear method for synchronization of fractional CDNs using a new fractional Proportional-Integral (PI) pinning control is proposed.  Its stability is proven and the synchronization criteria are obtained. The criteria have been simplified using two corollaries so the right value for the variables can be easily assigned. The proposed method is compared with the conventional linear method which uses Proportional (P) controller. In the comparison, the mean squared error function is used. The function measures the average of the squared errors and it is an instant indicator of the synchronization efficiency. A numerical simulation is repeated 100 times to obtain the averages over these runs. Each simulation has different random initial values for both controllers. The average of the errors in all the 100 simulations is obtained and the area under the function curve is defined as an overall performance index (OPI), which indicates the controller's overall performance. In control, small overshoot is always desired. In our work, the error variation is also used as a measure.  The maximum variation from the average of 100 simulations is calculated and compared for both methods. With all the statistical comparisons, it is clear that with the same power consumption, the proposed method outperforms the conventional one and achieves faster and smoother synchronization. Communication constraints exist in most real world CDNs. Communication constraints and their impact on control and synchronization of CDNs with fractional order are investigated in our study. A new adaptive method for synchronizing fractional CDN with disturbance and uncertainty is designed. Its stability is proven and its synchronization criteria are obtained for both fractional CDN with known and unknown parameters. Random disturbance is also included in both cases. Our results show that the new method is efficient in synchronizing CDNs with presence of both disturbance and uncertainty

Chaos control and synchronization of a hyperchaotic Zhou system by integral sliding mode control

In this paper, an adaptive integral sliding mode control scheme is proposed for synchronization of hyperchaotic Zhou systems. In the proposed scheme, an integral sliding mode control is designed to stabilize a hyperchaotic Zhou system with known parameters to its unstable equilibrium at the origin. The control is then applied to the synchronization of two identical systems, i.e., a slave and a master hyperchaotic Zhou system with unknown parameters. The adaptive control mechanism introduced synchronizes the systems by estimating the unknown parameters. Simulation results have shown that the proposed method has an excellent convergence from both speed and accuracy points of view, and it outperforms Vaidyanathan's scheme, which is a well-recognized scheme in this area

Fractional PI pinning synchronization of fractional complex dynamical networks

A novel method for synchronization of fractional order complex dynamical networks using a new fractional Proportional-Integral (PI) pinning control scheme is presented in this paper. Stability of this network is proved via the Lyapunov stability theorem, and the synchronizability criterion is obtained. Although one can also design a proportional pinning control scheme to synchronize the whole network, our proposed fractional PI control is more efficient. Numerical simulations on Lorenz oscillator's interaction over a sample network have shown that the proposed fractional PI controller can provide a faster synchronization with less overshoot to the reference state compared to conventional proportional controller with the same power consumptio