Effect of Leakage Delays on Bifurcation in Fractional-Order Bidirectional Associative Memory Neural Networks with Five Neurons and Discrete Delays

As is well known that time delays are inevitable in practice due to the finite switching speed of amplifiers and information transmission between neurons. So the study on the Hopf bifurcation of delayed neural networks has aroused extensive attention in recent years. However, it’s worth mentioning that only the communication delays between neurons were generally considered in most existing relevant literatures. Actually, it has been proven that a kind of so-called leakage delays cannot be ignored because the self-decay process of a neuron’s action potential is not instantaneous in hardware implementation of neural networks. Though leakage delays have been taken into account in a few more recent works concerning the Hopf bifurcation of fractional-order bidirectional associative memory neural networks, the addressed neural networks were low-dimension or the involved time delays were single. In this paper, we propose a five-neuron fractional-order bidirectional associative memory neural network model, which includes leakage delays and discrete communication delays to meet the characteristics of real neural networks better. Then we use the stability theory of fractional differential equations and Hopf bifurcation theory to investigate its dynamic behavior of Hopf bifurcation. The Hopf bifurcation of the proposed model are studied by taking the involved two different leakage delays as the bifurcation parameter respectively, and two kinds of sufficient conditions for Hopf bifurcation are obtained. A numerical example as well as its simulation plots and phase portraits are given at last. Our results indicate that a Hopf bifurcation rises near the zero equilibrium point when the leakage delay reaches its critical value which is given by an explicit formula. Particularly, the results of numerical simulations show that the leakage delay would narrow the stability region of the proposed system and make the Hopf bifurcation occur earlier.