Spectrum analysis of LTI continuous-time systems with constant delays: A literature overview of some recent results

In recent decades, increasingly intensive research attention has been given to dynamical systems containing delays and those affected by the after-effect phenomenon. Such research covers a wide range of human activities and the solutions of related engineering problems often require interdisciplinary cooperation. The knowledge of the spectrum of these so-called time-delay systems (TDSs) is very crucial for the analysis of their dynamical properties, especially stability, periodicity, and dumping effect. A great volume of mathematical methods and techniques to analyze the spectrum of the TDSs have been developed and further applied in the most recent times. Although a broad family of nonlinear, stochastic, sampled-data, time-variant or time-varying-delay systems has been considered, the study of the most fundamental continuous linear time-invariant (LTI) TDSs with fixed delays is still the dominant research direction with ever-increasing new results and novel applications. This paper is primarily aimed at a (systematic) literature overview of recent (mostly published between 2013 to 2017) advances regarding the spectrum analysis of the LTI-TDSs. Specifically, a total of 137 collected articles-which are most closely related to the research area-are eventually reviewed. There are two main objectives of this review paper: First, to provide the reader with a detailed literature survey on the selected recent results on the topic and Second, to suggest possible future research directions to be tackled by scientists and engineers in the field.