Internal and external stabilization of linear systems with constraints. (Q2429374)

The book is intended to present a vast collection of concepts and results on the stability of linear systems with constraints. Interestingly, the study of linear systems as constrained systems and from the point of view of control theorist is an active area of current research. The authors mention some relevant reasons. First, complex systems are often seen as a combination of linear systems and, the analysis of the stability of the components shed light on the complete system. Linear systems framework makes possible to obtain stability results with rather complex constraints. In particular, saturation constraints when input or output variables are bounded in fixed limits, reflects the fact that in real systems actuators or sensors or any device has a limited functional range. Moreover, linear constraints that combine input and output variables are also relevant in many real situations. The book deals with internal and external stability concepts. Internal stability refers to the evolution of the system per se while external stability investigate the relationships between the input and output variables. One can simplify and say that internal stability is in the spirit of Lyapunov stability, i.e. the system evolves toward stable states. External stability is an extension of BIBO (Bounded-input, Bounded-output) stability where the system is seen as a functional acting on the input variables. These two concepts of stability (and the many variations of them) have some relationships that are discussed. In summary, this book is written with an encyclopedic spirit that covers a large amount of different frameworks to deal with the problem of system stabilization with the aim of promoting the application of methods to the control of real systems.