Copyright © 2013 T. Botmart and P. Niamsup. 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.

Abstract

We investigate the local exponential synchronization for complex dynamical networks with interval time-varying delays in the dynamical nodes and the switched coupling term simultaneously. The constraint on the derivative of the time-varying delay is not required which allows the time delay to be a fast time-varying function. By using common unitary matrix for different subnetworks, the problem of synchronization is transformed into the stability analysis of some linear switched delay systems. Then, when subnetworks are synchronizable and nonsynchronizable, a delay-dependent sufficient condition is derived and formulated in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) by average dwell time approach and piecewise Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals which are constructed based on the descriptor model of the system and the method of decomposition. The new stability condition is less conservative and is more general than some existing results. A numerical example is also given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.