Computation of system balancing transformations and other applications of simultaneous diagonalization algorithms

An algorithm is presented in this paper for computing state-space balancing transformations directly from a state-space realization. The algorithm requires no "squaring up" or unnecessary matrix products. Various algorithmic aspects are discussed in detail. A key feature of the algorithm is the determination of a contragredient transformation through computing the singular value decomposition of a certain product of matrices without explicitly forming the product. Other contragredient transformation applications are also described. It is further shown that a similar approach may be taken, involving the generalized singular value decomposition, to the classical simultaneous diagonalization problem. These SVD-based simultaneous diagonalization algorithms provide a computational alternative to existing methods for solving certain classes of symmetric positive definite generalized eigenvalue problems.