Deciding the boundedness and dead-beat stability of constrained switching systems

Abstract

We study computational questions related with the stability of discrete-time linear switching systems with switching sequences constrained by an automaton. We first present a decidable sufficient condition for their boundedness when the maximal exponential growth rate equals one. The condition generalizes the notion of the irreducibility of a matrix set, which is a well known sufficient condition for boundedness in the arbitrary switching (i.e. unconstrained) case. Second, we provide a polynomial time algorithm for deciding the dead-beat stability of a system, i.e. that all trajectories vanish to the origin in finite time. The algorithm generalizes one proposed by Gurvits for arbitrary switching systems, and is illustrated with a real-world case study.