Search

Abstract: The pseudospectrum of a linear time-invariant system is the set in the complex plane consisting of all the roots of the characteristic equation when the system matrices are subjected to all possible perturbations with a given upper bound. The pseudospectral abscissa is defined as the maximum real part of the characteristic roots in the pseudospectrum and, therefore, it is for instance important from a robust stability point of view. In this paper we present an accurate method for the computation of the pseudospectral abscissa of retarded delay differential equations with discrete pointwise delays. Our approach is based on the connections between the pseudospectrum and the level sets of an appropriately defined complex function. The computation is done in two steps. In the prediction step, an approximation of the pseudospectral is obtained based on a rational approximation of the characteristic matrix and the application of a bisection algorithm. Each step in this bisection algorithm relies on checking the presence of the imaginary axis eigenvalues of a complex matrix, similar to the delay free case. In the corrector step, the approximate pseudospectral abscissa is corrected to any given accuracy, by solving a set of nonlinear equations that characterizes the extreme points in the pseudospectrum contours. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Stability of linear systems with uncertain bounded time-varying delays is studied under the assumption that the nominal delay values are not equal to zero. An input-output approach to stability of such systems is known to be based on the bound of the -norm of a certain integral operator. There exists a bound on this operator norm in two cases: in the case where the delay derivative is not greater than 1 and in the case without any constraints on the delay derivative. In the present note we fill the gap between the two cases by deriving a tight operator bound which is an increasing and continuous function of the delay derivative upper bound . For the new bound corresponds to the second case and improves the existing bound. As a result, for the first time, delay-derivative-dependent frequency domain and time domain stability criteria are derived for systems with the delay derivative greater than 1. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]