Covariance-analytic performance criteria, Hardy-Schatten norms and Wick-like ordering of cascaded systems

Abstract

This paper is concerned with robust performance analysis of linear stochastic systems acting as an integral operator on a standard Wiener process at the input and producing a stationary Gaussian random process at the output. We propose a performance criterion which uses the trace of an analytic function of the spectral density of the output process. This class of “covariance-analytic” cost functionals includes the usual mean square and risk-sensitive criteria as particular cases. Due to the “cost-shaping” analytic function, the covariance-analytic performance criterion depends on higher-order Hardy-Schatten norms of the system transfer function. We discuss the links of these norms with the asymptotic behaviour of cumulants of finite-horizon quadratic functionals of the system output and their variational properties pertaining to system robustness to statistically uncertain inputs which differ from the standard Wiener process. In the case of strictly proper finite-dimensional systems, governed in state space by linear stochastic differential equations, we develop a method for recursively computing the Hardy-Schatten norms through a recently proposed technique of rearranging cascaded linear systems, which resembles the Wick ordering of mixed products of noncommuting annihilation and creation operators in quantum mechanics. This computational procedure, which is one of the main results of the paper, involves a recurrence sequence of solutions to algebraic Lyapunov equations and represents the covariance-analytic cost as the squared H2-norm of an auxiliary cascaded system. These results are also compared with an alternative approach, which uses higher-order derivatives of stabilising solutions of parameter-dependent algebraic Riccati equations, and illustrated by a numerical example.