Dissipative systems: uncontrollability, observability and RLC realizability

TL;DR

This paper extends the theory of dissipativity to uncontrollable and unobservable systems, analyzing the role of storage functions and proposing new definitions to better understand system behavior and realizability.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of dissipativity in uncontrollable and unobservable systems, including conditions for equivalence and new intuitive definitions.

Findings

Dissipativity of a system and its controllable part are equivalent under certain pole conditions.

Lossless autonomous behaviors require unobservable storage functions.

Embedding behaviors in controllable dissipative super-behaviors explains certain examples in literature.

Abstract

The theory of dissipativity has been primarily developed for controllable systems/behaviors. For various reasons, in the context of uncontrollable systems/behaviors, a more appropriate definition of dissipativity is in terms of the dissipation inequality, namely the {\em existence} of a storage function. A storage function is a function such that along every system trajectory, the rate of increase of the storage function is at most the power supplied. While the power supplied is always expressed in terms of only the external variables, whether or not the storage function should be allowed to depend on unobservable/hidden variables also has various consequences on the notion of dissipativity: this paper thoroughly investigates the key aspects of both cases, and also proposes another intuitive definition of dissipativity. We first assume that the storage function can be expressed in terms of the external variables and their derivatives only and prove our first main result that, assuming the uncontrollable poles are unmixed, i.e. no pair of uncontrollable poles add to zero, and assuming a strictness of dissipativity at the infinity frequency, the dissipativities of a system and its controllable part are equivalent. We also show that the storage function in this case is a static state function. We then investigate the utility of unobservable/hidden variables in the definition of storage function: we prove that lossless autonomous behaviors require storage function to be unobservable from external variables. We next propose another intuitive definition: a behavior is called dissipative if it can be embedded in a controllable dissipative {\em super-behavior}. We show that this definition imposes a constraint on the number of inputs and thus explains unintuitive examples from the literature in the context of lossless/orthogonal behaviors.