excessive free weighting matrices. As a way of reducing the number of decision variables, at the sacrifice of conservatism, relaxations
based on the Jensen inequality lemma [1] have been attracted in [7–14,17–19].
On the other hand, the delay partitioning approach has been attracted in the derivation process. Recently, the method of dividing delay
(including the discretized Lyapunov functional approach in [1] and the delay decomposition approach in Gouaisbaut and Peaucelle [20]
and Han [21]) is the best one to handle the stability of system (1) with constant delay, by which the result near analytical delay limit can be
obtained. Since the augmented matrix S has much more room to be adjusted in the criterion, the functional can achieve the benefitof
reducing the conservatism. Furthermore, partitioning of the delay intervals into n4 2 subintervals may lead to further improvements, for
examples, another delay partitioning was introduced in [3,6,20,21,24,29], which corresponded to the partitioning into two subintervals of
½0; h
a
and of ½h
a
; h
b
. Therefore, it is natural that the less conservative stability results can be obtained when the delay decomposition
approach is extended to the case of time-varying delay. So far, by dividing interval ½ 0; τðtÞ into N non-uniform sub-intervals, the
pioneering studies have been provided, see [21,22]. But, the purpose of reducing conservatism is still limited due to the existence of
multiple coefficients and the impact of subintervals with uniform size [22,25,26]. Moreover, it is still a quite difficult task to divide interval
½0;
τðtÞ in a more reasonable manner [22], so that the functional with the augmented matrix can easily be constructed to obtain less
conservative stability results.
In practice, the systems almost contain some uncertainties because it is very difficult to obtain an exact mathematical model due to
environment noise, uncertain or slowly varying parameters, etc. Most recently, the stability analysis for time-delay systems has been
extended to the case of the systems with nonlinear perturbations [25–27] and fuzzy systems [31,32], while the proposed result also has
been expanded to disturbance attenuation analysis [33,38] and H1 controller/filter design [31,32,36] and robust fault detection [34,37] for
the above systems. Ramakrishnan and Ray [25] studied the problem of stability analysis of the linear systems with nonlinear perturbation
by partitioning the delay interval into two segments of equal length. Zhang et al. [26] employed some novel integral inequalities (Lemmas
1 and 2 in [26]) to derive an improved stability criterion for the above systems. He et al. [33] investigated the disturbance attenuation
problem and H1 controller design for the linear systems. Lin et al. considered the H1 filter design problem [31] and observer-based H1
control design problem [32] for nonlinear system via T–S fuzzy model approach. Most recently, Liu [35] further studied the stability
analysis of linear systems. However, there also exists further room to investigate the upper bound of the time-derivative of the LK
functional, and the delay interval may be divided into two unequal subintervals or more subintervals [22,24,29]. This motivates the
present research to develop a novel method for stability problem for the concerned systems with less conservatism by making full use of
the information of time-delays and constructing a novel LK functional via variable delay dividing technique.
Motivated by the above discussions, this paper will focus on the delay-fractional-dependent stability problem of linear systems with
interval time-varying delay. Inspired by the reciprocally convex approach in [10], and some integral inequalities in [1,7,13], and then the
work of Kim [12], Zhang [22] and Briat [9],wefirstly construct a novel delay-fractional-dependent LK functional by developing a delay
decomposition approach, in which the integral interval ½t h
b
; 0 is decomposed into ½t h
b
; t h
a
ατ, ½t h
a
ατ; th
a
and
½t h
a
; t ðh
a
=2Þ, ½t ðh
a
=2Þ; t with 0o α o 1 and τ 9 h
b
h
a
. Secondly, we derive a stability criterion for system (1) by suitably using
the inequalities such as (4)– (8) in Lemma 1 below. Since a tuning parameter
α and different delay partitioning method are introduced, the
information about xðt h
a
ατÞ and xðt ððh
a
=2ÞÞ can be taken into full consideration. Meanwhile, based on the convex combination
approach, the cross team in the time derivative of LK functional can be estimated more exactly without any direct approximation of the
delay terms in the derivation process. Therefore, using the variable delay decomposition approach, the Lyapunov matrices in LK functional
of this paper may be different in the delay intervals and the LMIs also may be different in the stability conditions, and thus compared with
the methods using the same Lyapunov matrices and the uniformly dividing delay subintervals, the variable and different Lyapunov
matrices-based method may lead to less conservatism. Finally, two well-known numerical examples are used to compare with some
previous results and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
2. Problem formulation
Consider the following linear system with a time-varying state delay:
_
xðtÞ¼AxðtÞþA
τ
xðt τðtÞÞ
xðtÞ¼
ϕðtÞ; 8t A ½h
b
; 0;
(
ð1Þ
where xðtÞis the state vector.
ϕðtÞ is the continuous initial vector function defined on ½h
b
; 0; the matrices A; A
τ
are constant matrices with
appropriate dimensions.
In this paper, the delay
τðtÞ is assumed to be time-varying delay as the following two cases:
Case 1.
τðtÞ is a differentiable function, satisfying for all t Z 0:
0o h
a
r τðtÞr h
b
;
_
τðtÞr h
d
ð2Þ
Case 2.
τðtÞ is not differentiable or the upper bound of the derivative of τðtÞ is unknown, and τðtÞ satisfies
0o h
a
r τðtÞr h
b
ð3Þ
where h
a
; h
b
and h
d
are some given values.
The purpose of this paper is to find a stability criterion, which is less conservative than the existing results. Such a criterion may be
used to compute the tolerable delay bound h
b
for given h
a
or vice versa.
To end this section, we introduce the following lemmas which are useful in stability analysis for the linear system.
J. An et al. / ISA Transactions 53 (2014) 210–219 21 1