Optimal switching signal design with a cost on switching action

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a particular class of optimal switching problem for the linear-quadratic switched system in discrete time, where an optimal switching sequence is designed to minimize the quadratic performance index of the system with a switching cost. This is a challenging issue and studied only by few papers. First, we introduce a total variation function with respect to the switching sequence to measure the volatile switching action. In order to restrain the switching magnitude, it is added to the cost functional as a penalty. Then, the particular optimal switching problem is formulated. With the positive semi-definiteness of matrices, we construct a series of exact lower bounds of the cost functional at each time and the branch and bound method is applied to search all global optimal solutions. For the comparison between different global optimization methods, some numerical examples are given to show the efficiency of our proposed method.