Analyzing piecewise linear dynamical systems

This article presents a method of analyzing mixed logic/dynamic systems. The article describes the development of a computational tool for the analysis of piecewise linear (PL) dynamical systems. Unfortunately, many PL controllers are developed from ad hoc “intelligent systems” ideas which do not aim or allow the associated dynamic behavior to be predicted. An example of such a system is the anti-skid braking system in a car, where the controller is rule-based and designed using the engineer´s knowledge of the system. The only current viable approach to testing such a system is by using extensive simulation and prototype testing, which must be repeated for each of the different car models on which it is installed. Anything that provides insight into the logic and dynamic interaction of such a system would be useful: hence the development of the work in this article. Similarly, systems with programmable logic controllers and gain schedulers also fall into the class of piecewise linear systems. The authors take ideas and known results from linear systems, convex set theory, and computational geometry and synthesize them to create an analysis tool for studying a class of systems that mix logic and dynamics. We choose to develop a computational analysis tool primarily because the traditional theoretical analysis of piecewise linear processes is intractable, except, that is, for certain local dynamic behavior