Stable polyhedra in parameter space (Q1400334)

This nicely written paper focuses on robust design of low order controllers for linear dynamical systems described by polynomial equations. The paper is motivated by a recent striking result by Ho, Datta and Bhattacharyya stating that the stability region of a PID controller in the controller parameter space is a convex polygon as soon as the proportional gain is fixed. The original proof used the Hermite-Biehler theorem. In this paper an alternate proof is derived by studying geometrical properties of the stability boundary in the controller parameter space. The result is also generalized to a slightly larger class of problems including robustness analysis. An interesting application to simultaneous stabilization is also described, where the whole set of robust PID parameters with given proportional gain is obtained by computing intersections of convex polygons.