Unifying theory for stability of continuous, discontinuous, and discrete-time dynamical systems

Abstract

Continuous-time dynamical systems whose motions are continuous with respect to time (called continuous dynamical systems), may be viewed as special cases of continuous-time dynamical systems whose motions are not necessarily continuous with respect to time (called discontinuous dynamical systems, or DDS). We show that the classical Lyapunov stability results for continuous dynamical systems are embedded in the authors’ stability results for DDS (given in [H. Ye, A.N. Michel, L. Hou, Stability theory for hybrid dynamical systems, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 43 (4) (1998) 461–474]), in the following sense: if the hypotheses for a given Lyapunov stability result for continuous dynamical systems are satisfied, then the hypotheses of the corresponding stability result for DDS are also satisfied. This shows that the stability results for DDS in [H. Ye, A.N. Michel, L. Hou, Stability theory for hybrid dynamical systems, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 43 (4) (1998) 461–474] are much more general than was previously known, and that the quality of the DDS results therein is consistent with that of the classical Lyapunov stability results for continuous dynamical systems. By embedding discrete-time dynamical systems into a class of DDS with equivalent stability properties, we also show that when the hypotheses of the classical Lyapunov stability results for discrete-time dynamical systems are satisfied, then the hypotheses of the corresponding DDS stability results are also satisfied. This shows that the results for DDS in [H. Ye, A.N. Michel, L. Hou Stability theory for hybrid dynamical systems, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 43 (4) (1998) 461–474] are much more general than previously known, having connections even with discrete-time dynamical systems! Finally, we demonstrate by the means of a specific example that the stability results for DDS are less conservative than corresponding classical Lyapunov stability results for continuous dynamical systems.