Strong stability of linear delay-difference equations

Abstract: This paper considers linear delay-difference equations, that is, equations relating the state at a given time with its past values over a given bounded interval. After providing a well-posedness result and recalling Hale--Silkowski Criterion for strong stability in the case of equations with finitely many pointwise delays, we propose a generalization of the notion of strong stability to the more general class of linear delay-difference equations with an integral term defined by a matrix-valued measure. Our main result is an extension of Melvin Criterion for the strong stability of scalar equations, showing that local and global strong stability are equivalent, and that they can be characterized in terms of the total variation of the function defining the equation. We also provide numerical illustrations of our main result.