Throughout the past few decades, the theory of finite-time control has undergone a booming development in both theory and practice. Research on finite-time control of nonlinear systems has attracted substantial attention from scholars and achieved fruitful results. There are two typical types of finite-time control: One describes the transient performance of the system rather than the steady-state performance in Lyapunov stability, also known as finite time boundedness (FTB); the other describes a faster convergence performance of the closed-loop system than the exponential stability constructed in the sense of Lyapunov stability theory and it is the optimal control method in terms of time optimization, called finite-time stability (FTS).

Compared with the non-finite time control, the finite-time control has superior performance for better accuracy, robustness, and anti-interference. It has been applied widely in many fields, for example in missile guidance systems, trajectory correction under impulsive control, active suspension systems of vehicles, coordination of manipulator's motion, walking patterns for biped robots, attitude control of spacecraft, automobile control systems, and so on. Due to their theoretical and practical significance, finite-time control (FTB and FTS) strategies for complex systems have long been and will continue to be one of the most active research areas. Although there are many interesting publications on finite-time control of complex systems in recent years, there remain many challenging open issues.

The purpose of this Special Issue is to explore recent trends and developments in finite-time control of complex systems and their applications and provide a platform for researchers to disseminate original research in the fields of finite-time control of complex systems. We welcome research articles as well as review articles that discuss the current state of the art

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• FTB/FTS of nonlinear dynamical systems
• FTB/FTS of hybrid systems
• FTB/FTS of multi-agent systems
• FTB/FTS of delayed systems
• FTB/FTS of stochastic systems
• FTB/FTS of networked control systems
• Applications to complex systems under finite-time control