Stability Analysis for Neutral Delay Markovian Jump Systems with Nonlinear Perturbations and Partially Unknown Transition Rates

The problem of exponential stability for the uncertain neutral Markovian jump systems with interval time-varying delays and nonlinear perturbations is investigated in this paper. This study starts from the corresponding nominal systems with known and partially unknown transition rates, respectively. By constructing a novel augmented Lyapunov functional which contains triple-integral terms and fully utilizes the bound of the delay, the delay-range-dependent and rate-dependent exponential stability criteria are developed by the Lyapunov theory, reciprocally convex lemma, and free weighting matrices. Then, the results about nominal systems are extended to the uncertain case. Finally, numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods. 1. Introduction Neutral time-delay systems have been the focus of the research community, which are often encountered in such practical situations as distributed networks, population ecology, processes including steam or heat exchanges [1], and robots in contact with rigid environments [2], and so forth. The existence of time delay may cause the instability of the systems, thus making the stability analysis of time-delay systems an interesting topic. Existing results can be roughly classified into two categories, delay-independent criteria and delay-dependent criteria, where the latter is generally regarded as less conservative. In addition, it should be pointed out that the stability of neutral time-delay systems is more difficult to tackle since the derivative of the delayed state is involved. The situation is similar as singular systems [3, 4], whose stability problem is more complicated than that for regular systems because more factors need to be considered. In the past decades, considerable attention has been devoted to the robust delay-independent stability and delay-dependent stability of linear neutral systems, which are mainly obtained based on the Lyapunov-Krasovskii (L-K) method [5–8]. Furthermore, when nonlinear perturbations or parameter uncertainties appear in neutral systems, some results on stability analysis have been also presented [9–14]. Various techniques have been proposed in these papers, for example, model transformation techniques, the improved bounding techniques, and matrix decomposition approaches. In particular, He et al. [14] propose a new method for dealing with time-delay systems, which employs free weighting matrices to express the relationships between the terms in the Newton-Leibniz formula and has brought novel results. However, many complex systems with