Hierarchy of LMI conditions for the stability analysis of time-delay systems

Assessing stability of time-delay systems based on the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals has been the subject of many contributions. Most of the results are based, first, on the design of more and more involved class of functionals and, finally, on the use of the famous Jensen’s inequality. In contrast with this design process, the present paper aims at providing a generic set of integral inequalities which are asymptotically non conservative and then to design functionals driven by these inequalities. The resulting set of stability conditions forms a hierarchy of LMI which is competitive with the most efficient existing methods (delay-partitioning, discretization and sum of squares), in terms of conservatism and of complexity. Finally, some examples show the efficiency of the method.