Contraction criteria for incremental stability of differential systems with discontinuous right-hand sides.

Incremental stability analysis, which plays a crucial role in dynamical systems, especially nonlinear systems, has attracted more and more concern for its applications in real world control systems nowadays. This paper presents a constructive approach to derive sufficient conditions for incremental exponential stability of the Filippov solutions of a class of differential systems with discontinuous right-hand sides, by introducing a sequence of continuous dynamical systems which is uniformly contracting and approximating the Filippov systems in terms of the evolution map graphs. Afterwards, several applications of the derived theoretical results are explored. Some specific classes of control dynamical systems with discontinuous right-hand sides are studied and relative detailed conditions are presented to show the power of the present approach to investigate the stability of switched dynamical systems, Hopfield neural network with discontinuous activations and sliding mode control.