Bounds of imaginary spectra of LTI systems in the domain of two of the multiple time delays

The stability of linear time invariant (LTI) systems with independent multiple time delays and the cluster treatment of characteristic roots (CTCR) paradigm are investigated from a new perspective. It is known that for such systems, all the imaginary characteristic roots can be detected completely on a small set of hypersurfaces in the domain of the delays (Sipahi and Olgac, 2006a). They are called kernel hypersurfaces (KH). The complete description of KH is the only prerequisite for the CTCR stability assessment procedure. As the number of delays increases, however, their evaluation becomes infeasible. Instead, we present a procedure to extract the 2-D cross-sections of these hypersurfaces in the domain of any two of the delays by fixing the remaining delays. In the 2-delay domain of interest, the exact upper and lower bounds of the imaginary spectra are determined. For this, a combination of half-angle tangent representation of the characteristic equation and the Dixon resultant theory is used as the main contributions of this paper. The complete KH are obtained by sweeping the root crossing frequency in this interval. Using this knowledge CTCR creates the cross-section of the stability map in the domain of the two arbitrarily selected delays. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology over an example case study with three independent delays and two commensurate ones. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Ltd.