A modified Lyapunov functional with application to stability of neutral-type neural networks with time delays

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem for stability of neutral-type dynamical neural networks involving delay parameters. Different form the previously reported results, the states of the neurons involve multiple delays and time derivative of states of neurons include discrete time delays. The stability of such neural systems has not been given much attention in the past literature due to the difficulty of finding Lyapunov functionals which are suitable for stability analysis of this type of neural networks. This paper constructs a generalized Lyapunov functional by introducing new terms into the well-known Lyapunov functional that enables us to conduct a theoretical investigation into stability analysis of delayed neutral-type neural systems. Based on this modified novel Lyapunov functional, sufficient criteria are derived, which guarantee the existence, uniqueness and global asymptotic stability of the equilibrium point of the neutral-type neural networks with multiple delays in the states and discrete delays in the time derivative of the states. The applicability of the proposed stability conditions rely on testing two basic matrix properties. The constraints impose on the system matrices are determined by using nonsingular M-matrix condition, and the constraints imposed on the coefficients of the time derivative of the delayed state variables are derived by exploiting the vector-matrix norms. We also note that the obtained stability conditions have no involvement with the delay parameters and expressed in terms of nonlinear Lipschitz activation functions. We present a constructive numerical example for this class of neural networks to give a systematic procedure for determining the imposed conditions on the whole system parameters of the delayed neutral-type neural systems.