Temporal and one-step stabilisability and detectability of discrete-time linear systems

In a past study the authors drew attention to the fact that time-varying discrete-time linear systems may be temporarily uncontrollable and unreconstructable and that this is vital knowledge for both control engineers and system scientists. Describing and detecting the temporal loss of controllability and reconstructability requires considering discrete-time systems with variable dimensions and the j-step, k-step Kalman decomposition. In this study for linear discrete-time systems with variable dimensions measures of temporal and one-step stabilisability and detectability are developed. These measures indicate to what extent the temporal loss of controllability and reconstructability may lead to temporal instability of the closed-loop system when designing a static state or dynamic output feedback controller. The measures are calculated by solving specific linear quadratic cheap control problems by means of standard linear quadratic control algorithms. The importance of our developments for control system design is illustrated by means of two numerical examples.