Discretized Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional for coupled differential–difference equations with multiple delay channels

Many practical systems have a large number of state variables, but only a few components involve time delays. These components are often scalar or low dimensional, and typically only one delay is present in each such component. A special form of coupled differential–difference equations with one delay per channel proposed recently is well suited to formulate such systems. This article extends the discretized Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional method to this class of systems. In addition to generality, this formulation also drastically reduces the computational cost for a typical system, and therefore is appropriate to use even for time-delay systems of retarded type. The discretized formulation is also simpler than the previous formulation for systems with multiple delays.