Contraction principle and its applications in synchronization of nonlinearly coupled systems (Q2466575)

The subject of the paper is the system of coupled ordinary differential equations (ODEs) \[ \dot x_i = f(x_i) + G_i(x), \quad i=1,\dots,n, \tag{1} \] where \(x_i\in \mathbb R^m\), \(x=(x_1,\dots,x_n)\). The coupling function \(G_i\) has the following property \(G_i(x)=\sum C_{ji}(x_j-x_i,x)\) with \(C_{ij}=C_{ji}\) and \(C_{ji}(0,x)=0\). Under contraction principle the authors understand the known sufficient condition for the stability of linear ODEs, namely, when all eigenvalues of the matrix \(A(t)+A^T(t)\) have negative real parts, then the linear ODE \(\dot x=A(t)x\) is asymptotically stable. In this paper, the authors apply this condition to the linearization of (1) around the synchronous orbit \(x_1(t)=\cdots=x_n(t)\) and obtain some sufficient conditions for the stability of the synchronous solutions.