On the Kronecker canonical form of a full row rank matrix pencil and applications

Abstract

Abstract The Kronecker canonical form (KCF) of matrix pencils plays an important role in many fields such as systems control and differential–algebraic equations. In this article, we compute a finite and infinite Jordan chain and also a singular chain of vectors corresponding to a full row rank matrix pencil using an extended algorithm, first introduced by Jones (1999, Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Mathematics, Loughborough University of Technology, Loughborough, UK). The proposed method exploits these vectors forming the chains corresponding to the finite and infinite eigenvalues and to the right minimal indices of the pencil. This leads to the computation of two transformation matrices for obtaining under strict equivalence the KCF of the pencil. An application to the study of homogeneous linear rectangular descriptor systems is considered and closed form solutions are obtained in terms of these two transformation matrices. All the results are illustrated with an example.