State-observer-based approach for identification and monitoring of complex dynamical networks

Recently, lots of work investigated the geometry features, synchronization and control of complex dynamical networks provided with certain topology. But in the real life, the exact topology of a network is often uncertain. In this paper, a new approach for approximately identifying the topology of a complex network is proposed based on the state observer design only using a scalar coupling signal. Unlike the other methods assuming that the dynamics of the network can be described by a linear stochastic model, or using states of the nodes to design an adaptive observer, we use the output variable to design a state observer to approximately identify the topology of a complex network and monitor any changes of the topology structure.