1178 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 55, NO.

11, NOVEMBER 2008

Stability Analysis of a Class of Nonlinear

Fractional-Order Systems
Xiang-Jun Wen, Zheng-Mao Wu, and Jun-Guo Lu

Abstract—In this paper, a stability theorem of nonlinear frac- II. FRACTIONAL DERIVATIVE AND ITS APPROXIMATION
tional-order differential equations is proven theoretically by using
the Gronwall–Bellman lemma. According to this theorem, the
In what follows, we introduce the definition of fractional
linear state feedback controller is introduced for stabilizing a derivative in brief. Fractional calculus is a generalization of
class of nonlinear fractional-order systems. And, a new criterion integration and differentiation to a noninteger-order integro-dif-
is derived for designing the controller gains for stabilization, in ferential operator [2] defined by
which control parameters can be selected via the pole placement
technique of the linear fractional-order control theory. Finally, the
theoretical results are further substantiated by simulation results (1)
of the fractional-order chaotic Lorenz System with desired design
requirements.
Index Terms—Chaos, fractional-order system, linear state feed- where is a complex number, is the real part of , and
back, nonlinear, stability. the subscripts and denote lower limit and upper limit of the
integral operator, respectively.
Formulations of noninteger-order derivatives fall into
I. INTRODUCTION two main classes: Riemann–Liouville derivative and Grün-
ward–Letnikov derivative, on one hand, defined as [1]
RACTIONAL calculus is a 300-year-old mathematical
F topic. Despite of having a long history, it was not used
in physics and engineering for a long period. However, during
(2)
the last ten years or so, fractional calculus has started to attract
or the Caputo derivative on the other, defined as [16]
increasing attention of physicists and engineers from an ap-
plication point of view [1]–[3]. It is found that many systems
in interdisciplinary fields can be elegantly described with the (3)
help of fractional derivatives. Many systems are known to
display fractional-order dynamics, such as viscoelastic systems with , i.e., is the first integer that is not less than ,
[4], dielectric polarization [5], electrode–electrolyte polar- where is the Gamma function. The geometric and phys-
ization [6], electromagnetic waves [7], quantitative finance ical interpretation of the fractional derivatives was given in [16].
[8], and quantum evolution of complex systems [9]. More Here and throughout, only the Caputo definition is used since its
recently, a lot of chaotic behaviors have been shown in the frac- initial conditions take on the same form as for integer-order dif-
tional-order systems [10]–[15]. At the same time, controlling ferential equations. The Laplace transform of the Caputo frac-
fractional-order systems has become one of the most active tional derivative (3) is
fields, especially controlling nonlinear fractional-order sys-
tems. As far as we know, most of the existing control methods
for fractional-order systems only focus on the numerical anal-
ysis but not on the theoretic analysis. In this paper, a stability (4)
theorem of nonlinear fractional-order differential equations is
with , where denotes the Laplace
proven theoretically with Gronwall–Bellman lemma. Then,
operator. Upon considering all the initial conditions to be zero,
based on this stability theorem, a simple criterion is derived for
(4) can be reduced to
designing the gains of the state feedback controller for stabi-
lizing a class of nonlinear fractional-order systems, in which
(5)
control parameters can be selected via the pole placement
technique of the linear control theory.
Therefore, the fractional integral operator of order “ ” can be
represented by the transfer function in the fre-
Manuscript received December 01, 2007; revised April 12, 2008 and June
06, 2008. Current version published December 10, 2008. This paper was rec-
quency domain. The standard definitions of fractional differin-
ommended by Associate Editor O. De Feo. tegral do not allow direct implementation of fractional opera-
X.-J. Wen is with NNPSB, Guangxi Power Grid Corporation, Nanning tors in time-domain simulations. An efficient method to circum-
530031, China (e-mail: wxjsjtu@126.com). vent this problem is to approximate fractional operators by using
Z.-M. Wu and J.-G. Lu are with the Department of Automation, Shanghai
Jiaotong University, Shanghai 200030, China. standard integer-order operators. An effective algorithm was de-
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TCSII.2008.2002571 veloped in [17] to approximate fractional-order transfer func-
1549-7747/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE
WEN et al.: STABILITY ANALYSIS OF A CLASS OF NONLINEAR FRACTIONAL-ORDER SYSTEMS 1179

tions. Basically, the idea is to approximate the system behavior and

in the frequency domain. By utilizing frequency-domain tech-
niques based on Bode diagrams, one can obtain a linear approx-
imation of a fractional-order integrator with any desired accu-
racy over any frequency band, the order of which depends on the
desired bandwidth and discrepancy between the actual and the
approximate magnitudes of the corresponding Bode diagrams.
This approximation approach has been adopted in [10]–[13] and
[15]. Approximations for with in step
size 0.1 are given in [10, Table I], with errors of approximately ..
2 dB. We will also use these approximations in the following .
simulations.
(11)
III. STABILITY THEOREM OF A CLASS OF NONLINEAR
FRACTIONAL-ORDER DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS Putting the -norm operator on the both sides of (11), it yields
Here, we will give out a stability theorem of a class of non-
linear fractional-order differential equations and prove it theo-
retically. First, the two-parameter function of the Mittag-Leffler
type , which plays a very important role in the fractional (12)
calculus, is introduced.
Definition 1 [18]: The two-parameter function of the Mittag-
where .
Leffler type is defined by the series expansion
Similarly, if there exists multiple roots of the eigenvalues for
the matrix A, the other proper nonsingular coordinate transfor-
(6) mation can be found, which makes the Jordan canonical form
of matrix A as
The Laplace transform of the Mittag-Leffler function in two pa-
rameters is (13)

Then, we have

(7)

Now, we list three useful lemmas (corollaries) that will be used

for proving the stability theorem.
Lemma 1 [1]: If , is an arbitrary real number,
is such that and is a real
constant, then (14)

Putting the -norm operator on the both sides of (14), it yields

(8)
Now, for the -dimension matrix, we have the corollary as
follows.
Corollary 1: If and , is an arbitrary real (15)
number, is such that and is
real constant, then Combining aforementioned situation, we obtain

(9)
(16)
where denotes the eigenvalues of the matrix and
denotes the -norm. where .
Proof: Considering the -dimension matrix , if it has Lemma 2 [19]: If and
different eigenvalues, a proper nonsingular coordinate transfor- is the spectral radius of , then for any
mation can be found. It makes matrix norm

(10) (17)
1180 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 55, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2008

Lemma 3 [20] (Gronwall–Bellman lemma): Assume that: 1) From (23) to (25) and the corollary 1 (9), (22) gives
and are real-valued piecewise-continuous functions
defined on the real interval ; 2) is also real-valued
and ; and 3) and are nonnegative on
this interval. If for all

(18)

then for all , we have (26)

(19) According to the Lemma 3, and letting ,

, and
, we obtain
Based on the aforementioned definition and lemmas (corol-
laries), we give out the stability theorem of a class of frac-
tional-order differential equations as follows.
Theorem 1: Consider the -dimensional nonlinear fractional-
order dynamic system

(20) (27)

The integral in (27) equals to the sum of the two parts

with a constant linear regular matrix A, a nonlinear function
of states , and . If:
1) the zero solution of is asymptotically stable, and
;
2) , and ;
then , , is a stable solution of (28)
.
Proof: For the -dimensional fractional-order system Since , and when , we obtain
(20), where ,
and is continuous, taking Laplace transform on (20), we
obtain

(21)
(29)
where is an identity matrix.
Then, taking Laplace inverse transform for (21) by using the Similarly,
inverse Laplace transform formula of the Mittag-Leffler func-
tion in two parameters and the integral convolution, it yields

(22)

By part 2) of Theorem 1, there exists and such that (30)

(23) is holding, substituting for . From (28) to (30), and with

, (27) gives
Now let be chosen arbitrarily subject to

(24)

and consider solutions for which

(31)
(25)
WEN et al.: STABILITY ANALYSIS OF A CLASS OF NONLINEAR FRACTIONAL-ORDER SYSTEMS 1181

Now is arbitrarily small, so we have proved that

(32)

which implies stability of the zero solution.

IV. USING LINEAR STATE FEEDBACK TO STABILIZE A CLASS

OF NONLINEAR FRACTIONAL-ORDER SYSTEMS

Consider a controlled nonlinear system of the following form:

(33)
Fig. 1. Attractor of the Lorenz system with fractional order  = 0:8.
where , is the state vector,
is a constant linear matrix, is a nonlinear func-
tion, and is a control input to be designed. When where , , , and are four parameters and is the
, there exists unstable behavior, even chaos. Now, we use fractional order. And it can be rewritten as
the linear state feedback to construct the controller as follows:
(37)
(34)
where and
where and .
Theorem 2: For the controlled fractional-order system (33),
if the nonlinear term satisfies

(35)

and if and are selected to make the matrix asymp-

totically stable for the corresponding linear fractional-order dy- When , , , , and , its
namic system and , the system (33) can be chaotic figures are shown in Fig. 1. Since
stabilized by the controller (34).
Remark 1: Many fractional-order chaotic systems satisfy (38)
the condition (35). For example, fractional-order Chua’s circuit and
[10], fractional-order Lorenz system [14] and Chen system
[15], and fractional-order chaotic Rössler system [21], just to
mention a few.
Proof: According to the stability theory of the fractional-
order linear system [22] and the pole placement technique of
the linear control theory, it is easy to verify this theorem by
selecting B and K such that and (39)
.
for simplification, we construct the linear state feedback con-
troller as (34) and select
V. APPLICATIONS TO TYPICAL FRACTIONAL-ORDER
CHAOTIC SYSTEM
To illustrate the controller design method outlined earlier and (40)
to show its effectiveness, the controlling fractional-order Lorenz
System is given as an example. The fractional-order Lorenz
which makes the and
System can be written as
, by the eigenvalues of being .
Thus, the two conditions of Theorem 2 are satisfied well. It con-
cludes that the zero solution of the controlled system is stable.
The results of simulation are shown in Fig. 2, while the feed-
(36) back is activated at time 5 s.
1182 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS—II: EXPRESS BRIEFS, VOL. 55, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2008
Fig. 2. Stabilization of the fractional-order Lorenz system with the controller
started at t =5 s.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this brief, based on the Gronwall–Bellman lemma and the
property of fractional calculus, a stability theorem of nonlinear
fractional-order differential equations has been proven theoret-
ically. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first stability the-
orem for nonlinear fractional-order systems. Farther, a simple
criterion has been derived to construct the linear state feedback
controller that can stabilize original nonlinear fractional-order
systems. Simulation results have illustrated the effectiveness of
the theorem and the proposed control method.
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