International Journal of Systems Science

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Time-delay systems and their applications

Xian-Ming Zhang & Qing-Long Han

To cite this article: Xian-Ming Zhang & Qing-Long Han (2022) Time-delay systems and
their applications, International Journal of Systems Science, 53:12, 2477-2479, DOI:
10.1080/00207721.2022.2111888

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00207721.2022.2111888

Published online: 13 Sep 2022.

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SYSTEMS SCIENCE
2022, VOL. 53, NO. 12, 2477–2479
https://doi.org/10.1080/00207721.2022.2111888
GUEST EDITORIAL
Time-delay systems and their applications
Xian-Ming Zhang and Qing-Long Han
School of Science, Computing and Engineering Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia
1. Introduction
Boosted by the advanced developments of network
communication technologies, modern control sys-
tems have made considerable progress and have
been playing core roles in most applications, such as
unmanned surface vehicles, unmanned space vehicles,
smart grids, wastewater treatment processes, internet-
based teleoperation, artificial intelligence and intelli-
gent transportation systems (Gupta & Chow, 2010; D.
Zhang et al., 2020). However, time delays are unavoid-
able in a control system when network communication
is involved due to limited network bandwidth (X.-
M. Zhang et al., 2018). Time delays usually affect the
inner dynamics of a control system. Investigating the
effects of time delays on modern control systems is
clearly a significant research topic (X.-M. Zhang et al.,
2022).
On the other hand, in the last decade, great progress
has been made on time-delay systems. A novel result
contributes to the Wirtinger-based inequality pro-
posed in 2013 (Seuret & Gouaisbaut, 2013). With this
inequality, a new stability criterion can be derived
from a polynomial inequality, which has been proven
to be less conservative. However, due to the special
properties (say, the time derivative equals to one)
of time delays induced from network communica-
tion, it is a very challenging issue how to apply those
new developments in time-delay systems to modern
industrial control systems to disclose both the posi-
tive and negative effects of time delays on the system
performance. Moreover, it is also difficult to design
suitable controllers, protocols, and state estimators to
counter the negative effects of time delays on control
systems.
CONTACT Xian-Ming Zhang xianmingzhang@swin.edu.au
Technology, Melbourne 3122, Australia
© 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2. This special issue
The aim of this special issue is to present some up-to-
date research results on stability and control of time-
delay systems, and promote the research activities in
applications of time-delay systems to modern indus-
trial control systems. After a rigorous and careful peer-
review process, the editorial team have selected eight
high-quality papers from the submissions, including
two survey papers and six research articles. These two
survey papers provide recent developments on sta-
bility and predictor-based control of time-delay sys-
tems, and the other articles address some fundamental
issues, such as tracking control, consensus and syn-
chronisation of autonomous vehicle platoons, deepwa-
ter drilling riser systems and delayed fractional-order
coupled neural networks.
The survey paper (X.-M. Zhang et al., 2021) offers
an instructive review on the construction of suitable
augmented Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals tailored
for the Bessel-Legendre inequality. Besides, it also
makes an in-depth analysis of high-degree polynomial
inequalities on closed intervals, which is greatly ben-
eficial for researchers to apply them to some control
issues of practical systems.
Predictor-based control is an effective method to
deal with large time delays involved in networked con-
trol systems, mobile robot systems, and multi-agent
systems. One of the main reasons is that it can lead
to a delay-free closed-loop system by introducing a
prediction for future states. The survey paper (Deng
et al., 2021) presents a comprehensive review of the
up-to-date results on the predictor-based control of
time-delay systems. Several methods to design suit-
able predictor-based controllers are discussed based
School of Science, Computing and Engineering Technologies, Swinburne University of
2478 GUEST EDITORIAL
on both ordinary differential equations and partial dif-
ferential equations. Moreover, real-time implementa-
tions and applications of those predictor-based control
methods are also analysed in this paper.
Drilling risers play key roles in the exploration of
gas and oil resources in deep sea areas. The recoil
responses may threaten the safety of the drilling
platform. In order to reduce the negative effects of
recoil responses, some original researches have been
conducted in Zhao et al. (2021). By intentionally
introducing a bounded time-varying delay into the
control channel, the obtained controller can effec-
tively reduce the recoil responses of the riser sys-
tem and is more economic, which shows positive
effects of time delays on the deepwater drilling riser
systems.
In Gao et al. (2021), a new polytope model is
established to describe the vehicle lateral dynamics of
autonomous electric vehicles subject to communica-
tion delays. Based on this model, a network-based gain
scheduled controller that operates asynchronously
with the polytope system is designed, which provides
a pretty good solution to the problem of preview path
tracking for autonomous electric vehicles with event-
triggered transmission and bounded communication
delays.
For consensus of multi-agent systems with time
delays, two different control protocols are proposed
in Resmi et al. (2021) and Peng and He (2021),
respectively. Resmi et al. (2021) devise a Laguerre-
based model predictive control protocol for dynamic
consensus of linear time-invariant multi-agent sys-
tems with input delays, and its effectiveness is vali-
dated through a vehicle platoon with time delay. Peng
and He (2021) design a non-fragile control protocol
for nonlinear multi-agent systems with state and input
time-varying delays using the Lyapunov–Krasovskii
functional method.
Recently, fractional-order neural networks with
time delay have gained much attention. In S. Zhang
et al. (2021), the global synchronisation and finite-
time synchronisation is studied for a class of delayed
fractional-order complex neural networks. By intro-
ducing some new properties of fractional-order cal-
culus and two new lemmas, a couple of novel crite-
ria are obtained for both finite-time synchronisation
and global synchronisation of delayed fractional-order
complex neural networks. Three numerical examples
demonstrate their effectiveness.
Based on the recent results on determined time-
delay systems, stochastic stability analysis of Marko-
vian jump systems with two additive mode-dependent
time-varying delays is made in Liu et al. (2021).
By introducing a novel mode-dependent Lyapunov–
Krasovskii functional, together with a generalised
affine integral inequality, several stability criteria are
obtained for the system under study, and verified
through two numerical examples.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank researchers who submitted
their original works to this special issue. The authors would
like to thank reviewers who helped provide valuable comments
on the submissions from this special issue. They are in debt
to Professor Zidong Wang, Editor-in-Chief, and editorial assis-
tants of International Journal of Systems Science who edited this
special issue and made great efforts to maintain the rigorous
peer-review schedule and to publish these articles on time.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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