Abstract: This paper proposes a novel approach for fault diagnosis of a time-delay complex dynamical network. Unlike the other methods, assuming that the dynamics of the network can be described by a linear stochastic model, or using the state variables of nodes in the network to design an adaptive observer, it only uses the output variable of the nodes to design an observer and an adaptive law of topology matrix in the observer of a complex network, leading to simple design of the observer and easy realisation of topology monitoring for the complex networks in real engineering. The proposed scheme can monitor any changes of the topology structure of a time-delay complex network. The effectiveness of this method is successfully demonstrated by virtue of a complex networks with Lorenz model.

Key words: time-delay complex dynamical networks, fault diagnosis, observer, output variable