Abstract
To understand the functional behaviors of systems built on networks, it is essential to determine the uncertain topology of these networks. Traditional synchronization-based topology identification methods generally converge asymptotically or exponentially, resulting in their inability to give timely identification results. The finite-time stability theory is adopted in this paper with the aim of addressing the problem of fast identification of uncertain topology in networks. A novel finite-time topology observer is proposed to achieve finite-time topology identification and synchronization of general complex dynamical networks with time delay and second-order dynamical networks with time delay and nonlinear coupling. In addition, the proposed finite-time identification method is applied to power grids to address the problem of fast detection of line outages. Finally, 2 numerical experiments are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and rapidity of the proposed finite-time identification method.