Copyright © 2009 Jianting Zhou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The passivity problem is investigated for a class of stochastic uncertain neural networks with time-varying delay as well as generalized activation functions. By constructing appropriate Lyapunov-Krasovskii functionals, and employing Newton-Leibniz formulation, the free-weighting matrix method, and stochastic analysis technique, a delay-dependent criterion for checking the passivity of the addressed neural networks is established in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs), which can be checked numerically using the effective LMI toolbox in MATLAB. An example with simulation is given to show the effectiveness and less conservatism of the proposed criterion. It is noteworthy that the traditional assumptions on the differentiability of the time-varying delays and the boundedness of its derivative are removed.