Moment stability of stochastic processes with applications to control systems
Abstract.
We establish new conditions for obtaining uniform bounds on the moments of discrete-time stochastic processes. Our results require a weak negative drift criterion along with a state-dependent restriction on the sizes of the one-step jumps of the processes. The state-dependent feature of the results make them suitable for a large class of multiplicative-noise processes. Under the additional assumption of Markovian property, new result on ergodicity has also been proved. There are several applications to iterative systems, control systems, and other dynamical systems with state-dependent multiplicative noise, and we include illustrative examples to demonstrate applicability of our results.
Key words and phrases:
moment bound, stability, ergodicity, Markov processes, control systems.2010 Mathematics Subject Classification:
60J05, 60J20, 60F17, 93D05, 93E151. Introduction
The paper studies stability properties of a general class of discrete-time stochastic systems. Assessment of stability of dynamical systems is an important research area which has been studied extensively over the years. For example, in control theory a primary objective is to design suitable control policies which will ensure appropriate stability properties (e.g. bounded variance) of the underlying controlled system. There are various notions of stability of a system. In mathematics, stability often refers to equilibrium stability, which, for deterministic dynamical systems, is mainly concerned with qualitative behaviors of the trajectories of the system that start near the equilibrium point. For the stochastic counterpart, in Markovian setting it usually involves study of existence of invariant distributions and associated convergence and ergodic properties. A comprehensive source of results on different ergodicty properties for discrete-time Markov chains using Foster-Lyapunov functions is [15] (also see the references therein). Several extensions of such results have since then been explored quite extensively in the literature (for example, see [17, 18]). Another important book in this area is [9], which uses expected occupation measures of the chain for identifying conditions for stability.
The primary objective of the paper is to study moment stability, which concerns itself with uniform bounds on moments of a general stochastic process or, more generally, on expectations of the form for a given function . This is a bit different from the usual notions of stability in the Markovian setting as mentioned in the previous paragraph, but they are not unrelated. Indeed, if the process has certain underlying Lyapunov structure a strong form of Markovian stability holds which in particular implies moment stability. The result, which is based on Foster-Lyapunov criterion, can be described as follows. Given a Markov chain taking values in a Polish space with a transition probability kernel , suppose there exists a non-negative measurable function , called a Foster-Lyapunov function, such that the process possesses has the following negative drift condition: for some constant , a set , and a function
(1.1) |
If the set is petite, (which, roughly speaking, are the sets that have the property that any set is ‘equally accessible’ from any point inside the petite set - for definition and more details, see [16, 15]), the process has a unique invariant distribution and also . Moreover, under aperiodicity, it can be concluded that the chain is Harris ergodic, that is,
where is the -norm (see, the definition at the end of introduction) [15, Chapter 14]. In particular, one has as (which of course implies boundedness of ). Thus for a Markov process , one way to get a uniform bound on is to find a Foster-Lyapunov function such that (1.1) holds.
The objective of the first part of the paper is to explore scenarios where a strong negative drift condition like (1.1) does not hold or at least such a Lypaunov function is not easy to find for a specific . We do note that the required conditions in our results are formulated in terms of the target function itself. One pleasing aspect of this feature is that search for a suitable Lyapunov function is not required for applying these results.
Our main result, Theorem 2.2, deals with the general regime where the state process is a general stochastic process and not necessarily Markovian. While past study on stability mostly concerns homogeneous Markov processes, the literature in the case of more general processes including non-homogeneous Markov processes and processes with long-range dependence is rather limited. The starting point in Theorem 2.2 is a weaker negative drift like condition:
(1.2) |
which, if is a homogeneous Markov chain, is of course equivalent to for outside . As could be seen by comparing (1.2) with (1.1) that even in the Markovian setting, the results of [15, Chapter 14] will not imply In fact, condition (1.2) is not enough to guarantee such an assertion even in a deterministic setting. For example, consider the sequence on defined by
Clearly, even though the negative drift condition is satisfied for . But we showed in Theorem 2.2 that under a state-dependent restriction on the conditional moments of given (see Assumption 2.1 for details), the desired uniform moment bound can be achieved. Note that the above sequence fails (2.1-c) of Assumption 2.1 but satisfies the other two conditions.
In the (homogeneous) Markovian framework, Theorem 2.2 leads to a new result (c.f. Theorem 2.8) on Harris ergodicity of Markov chains which will be useful in occasions when Foster-Lyapunov drift criterion in form of (1.1) does not hold. Importantly, Theorem 2.8 does not require to be petite or prior checking of aperiodicity of the chain.
Theorem 2.2 is partly influenced by a result of Pemantle and Rosenthal [21] which established a uniform bound on under (1.2) and the additional assumption of a constant bound on conditional -th moment of one-step jumps of the process given , that is, . However, for a large class of stochastic systems the latter requirement of a uniform bound on conditional moments of jump sizes cannot be fulfilled. In particular, our work is motivated by some problems on stability about a class of stochastic systems with multiplicative noise where such conditions on one-step jumps are almost always state-dependent and can never be bounded by a constant. Our work generalized the result of [21] in two important directions - it uses a different “metric” to control the one step jumps and it allows such jumps to be bounded by a suitable state dependent function. Specifically, instead of we control the centered conditional -th moment of , that is, , in a state-dependent way. The latter quantity can be viewed as a distance between the actual position at time , , and the expected position at that time given the past information, , while [21] uses the distance between actual positions at times and . These extensions require a different approach involving different auxiliary estimates. The advantages of this new ‘jump metric’ and the state dependency feature have been discussed in detail after the the proof of Theorem 2.2. Together, they significantly increase applicability of our result to a large class of stochastic systems.
This is demonstrated in Section 3, where a broad class of systems with multiplicative noise is studied and new stability results (see Proposition 3.2 and Corollary 3.4) are obtained. This, in particular, includes stochastic switching systems and Markov processes of the form The last part of this section is devoted to the important problem of stabilization of stochastic linear systems with bounded control inputs. The problem of interest here is to find conditions which guarantee -boundedness of a stochastic linear system of the form with bounded control input. This has been studied in a previous work of the second author (see [24] and references therein for more background on the problem), and it has been shown that when is stabilizable, there exists a -history dependent control policy which assures bounded variance of such system provided the norm of the control is sufficiently large. This upper bound on the norm of the control is an artificial obstacle on its design, and it has been conjectured in [24] that it is not required although a proof couldn’t be provided. Here we show that this conjecture is indeed true (c.f. Proposition 3.7), and the artificial restriction on the control norm can be lifted largely owing to the new “metric” in Theorem 2.2. In fact, as Proposition 3.2 and Corollary 3.4 indicate this stabilization result can be easily extended to cover more general classes of stochastic control systems including the ones with multiplicative noise.
The article is organized as follows. The mathematical framework and the main results are described in Section 2. Section 3 discusses potential applications of our results for a large class of stochastic systems including switching systems, multiplicative Markov models, which are especially relevant to control theory.
Notation and terminology: For a probability kernel on , and a function , the function will be defined by . In similar spirit, for a measure on , will be defined by For a signed measure, , on . the corresponding total variation measure is denoted by , where as per the Jordan decomposition. If , where and are probability measures, the total variation distance is given by
More generally, if is a measurable function, the -norm of is defined by
Throughout, we will work on an abstract probability space . will denote the expectation operator under . In context of the process , will denote the conditional expectation given .
2. Mathematical framework and main results
The section presents two main results, Theorem 2.2 on uniform bounds on functions of a general stochastic process and Theorem 2.8 on ergodicity properties in the homogeneous Markovian setting. The mathematical framework pertains to a stochastic process taking values in a topological space and involves negative drift conditions outside a set , together with a state-dependent control on the size of one-step jumps of .
2.1. Uniform bounds for moments of stochastic processes
Assumption 2.1.
Theorem 2.2.
Remark 2.3.
-
•
The proof is a combination of Proposition 2.5 and Proposition 2.6. Proposition 2.5 first establishes a weaker version of the above assertion by showing that , for all . However, extension of the result from there to all (notice that ) requires a substantial amount of extra work and is achieved through Proposition 2.6.
-
•
Note that (2.1-c) is implied by the simpler condition: on for some constant .
Proof of Theorem 2.2.
At this stage it is instructive to compare Theorem 2.2 with [21, Theorem 1] and precisely note some of the improvements the former offer. The first significant extension is that Theorem 2.2 allows the jump sizes in (2.1-b) to be state dependent whereas, [21] requires
(†) |
for some constant . The resulting benefits are obvious as it allows the result in particular to be applicable to large class of multiplicative systems of the form
which [21, Theorem 1] will not cover. The second notable distinction is in the ‘metric’ used in (2.1-b) in controlling jump sizes : while [21] involves , our result only requires controlling the centered conditional -th moments of given , namely, . Of course, the latter leads to weaker hypothesis as
It is important to emphasize the advantages of the weaker hypothesis as the condition in († ‣ 2.1) precludes it from being applicable even to some additive models. To illustrate this with a simple example, consider a -valued process given by
where are -valued random variables with for . Since clearly the negative drift condition (c.f (2.1-a)) holds with . but for the jump sizes we can only have
This means that [21, Theorem 1] cannot be used to get for this simple additive system - a fact which easily follows from an elementary iteration argument (note, ). On the other hand, our theorem clearly covers such cases as
It should actually be noted that had Theorem 2.2 simply controlled the jump sizes by imposing the more restrictive condition, , the state-dependency feature was not enough to salvage the moment bound of the above additive system (because of the requirement for ). It is interesting to note that the results of [15] based on Foster-Lyapunov drift conditions also cannot directly be used in this simple example, as is not necessarily Markov (since the are not assumed to be i.i.d). To summarize, the weaker jump metric coupled with state dependency feature makes Theorem 2.2 a rather powerful tool in understanding stability for a broad class of stochastic systems. Some important results in this direction for switching systems have been discussed in the application section.
The following lemma will be used in various necessary estimates.
Lemma 2.4.
Let be a martingale relative to the filtration ,
(2.3) |
a non-negative random variable, and a constant. Then for some constants and
-
(a)
-
(b)
Proof.
Note that by Burkholder’s inequality (e.g., see [23]), there exists such that
Now by Hölder’s inequality and by (2.3)
(2.4) |
Now observe that for a random variable , by Hölder’s inequality and Markov’s inequality: , we have for and
Taking we have
and part (b) follows from (2.4). ∎
We now prove the two propositions which form the backbone of our main result, Theorem 2.2.
Proposition 2.5.
Suppose that Assumption 2.1 holds. Then for any
Proof of Proposition 2.5.
Fix an . Observe that it is enough to prove the result for such an . Writing , we can say, because of the growth assumption on (c.f (2.1-b)), that for every , there exists a constant such that
The constants appearing in various estimates below will be denoted by ’s. They will not depend on but may depend on the parameters of the system and the initial position .
Define and
Then is a martingale. Fix , and define the last time is in :
Notice that . On , for
(2.5) |
It follows that on ,
where .
On which corresponds to the case that the chain starting outside never enters by time , we have
Thus for ,
where we used (a) (2.1-c), (b) Lemma 2.4 along with the observation that
and (c) the fact that
Similarly, on ,
Next, note that because of (2.1-b)
which by (2.1-c) of course implies that for any ,
Lastly,
Thus,
where the choice of will be specified shortly, and Iterating, we have
(2.6) | ||||
Notice that for any , since ,
Choosing so that , (2.6) yields
and the assertion follows.
∎
The next proposition helps to extend the above result from any to as stipulated in Theorem 2.2. However it is also a stand-alone result that is applicable to certain models where Theorem 2.2 is not directly applicable. These are cases where one directly does not have any good estimate of the conditional centered moment as required in Theorem 2.6, but have suitable upper bounds for its norm. As a simple example, let be a stochastic process taking values in , whose temporal evolution is given by
where and are (real-valued) constants, and is an -adapted martingale difference process (that is, ) and for . Then Theorem 2.2 is not applicable, but the following proposition can be applied with to
Proposition 2.6.
Here cooresponds to the case that a.s, for some constant .
Proof of Proposition 2.6.
The constants appearing in various estimates below (besides the ones that appeared before) will be denoted by ’s. They will not depend on but may depend on the parameters of the system and the initial position .
Define , and as in the proof of Proposition 2.5. Fix , , and define by
Clearly, . For , notice that on ,
and hence on
It follows that for
Notice that can be estimated by Lemma 2.4 as
Also, for by Lemma 2.4,
Hence,
(2.7) |
We next estimate the above two terms separately, and for that we need the following bound which is an immediate consequence of Doob’s maximal inequality and assumption:
(2.8) |
Now notice that
(2.9) |
where .
Next notice that the term
can be estimated as
(2.10) |
where the third inequality is by (2.8). We now consider some cases.
Case 1: : Suppose that . Notice in this case this implies that It follows from (2.7), (2.9) and (2.10) (second case) that
Case 2: , and : Suppose that . Notice that , and imply that . Like the previous case, it again follows from (2.7), (2.9) and (2.10) (first case)
The other cases in the assertion follow similarly once we observe that and for , .
∎
2.2. Ergodicity of Markov processes
Theorem 2.2 leads to the following result on Harris ergodicity of Markov processes.
Definition 2.7.
A function is inf-compact if the level sets, are compact for all .
Note that an inf-compact function is lower-semicontinuous.
Theorem 2.8.
Let be a Markov process taking values in a locally compact separable space with transition kernel . Suppose for an inf-compact function , the following conditions hold:
-
(2.8-a)
for all ,
-
(2.8-b)
for some
where satisfies for some and some constant . This is of course same as requiring
-
(2.8-c)
and
Also, suppose that
-
(2.8-d)
is weak Feller, -irreducible, and admits a density with respect to some Radon measure , that is, , and that for every compact set , there exists a constant such that
Then
- (i)
-
(ii)
Under additional assumption of (2.8-d), is positive Harris recurrent (PHR) and aperiodic with a unique invariant distribution , and for any and
(2.11) or equivalently,
(2.12)
Proof.
(i) follows from the Theorem 2.2. Since is inf-compact, it follows from (i) that for every , is tight, and let be one of its limit point. Since is weak Feller, by the Krylov-Bogolyubov theorem [22, Theorem 7.1], is invariant for , and uniqueness of follows from the assumption of -irreducibility [9, Proposition 4.2.2] . Hence, for every , (along the full sequence) as .
For (ii) we start by establishing the following claim.
Claim: Suppose that for some . Then as for any .
Since is lower semi-continuous we have by (generalized) Fatou’s lemma,
for any . Now let for some and fix .
Since is tight, for a given , there exists a compact set (which depends on and which we take of the form for sufficiently large ) such that
Now by Hölder’s inequality
(2.13) |
for some . Similarly, .
Since , there exist such that in as , and for . In fact, we can choose such that for some compact set .
Observe that for
Hence
(2.14) |
Next, notice that is absolutely continuous with . Indeed, if , then , and hence . Let . For any ,
(2.15) |
Write
(2.16) |
and choose such that (2.13) holds for where is chosen such that . Since , choose sufficiently large such that , then a sufficiently large such that
Finally, since , and , we have as . Hence, we can choose a sufficiently large such that , and thus from (2.13), (2.14), (2.15) and (2.16),
This proves the claim, which in particular says that for any and any Borel set , . By [9, Theorem 4.3.4] (also see [8]), is aperiodic and PHR, and by the same result this implies The equivalence of the setwise convergence of and convergence in total-variation norm is a unique feature of PHR chains. Now note that by Hölder’s inequality for some
The equivalence of (2.11) and (2.12) follows from Lemma 2.9 below.
∎
Lemma 2.9.
Let be a signed measure on a complete separable metric space . Suppose that is a measurable function such that . Then
where recall
Proof.
The last inequality is trivial as for any measurable with , . For the first inequality, let be the Hahn decomposition for (in particular, ) , with the corresponding Jordan decomposition (i.e., supp and supp. Choose . Then
where the last equality is because supp. Similarly, choosing , we have , whence it follows that
∎
3. Applications
This sections is devoted to understanding stability of a broad class of multiplicative systems through application of the previous theorems.
3.1. Discrete time switching systems
Let be a Hilbert space and a Polish space. Suppose there exists a sequence of measurable maps such that for each , the function is a transition probability kernel. Consider a discrete-time -adapted process taking values in , whose dynamics is defined by the following rule: given the state ,
-
(SS-1)
first, is selected randomly according to the (possibly) time-inhomogenous transition probability distribution ,
-
(SS-2)
next given ,
where is a sequence of independent random variables taking values in a Banach space , is independent of and .
In general is a (possibly) time-inhomogeneous Markov process but clearly, neither nor is Markovian on its own. The stochastic system is known as a discrete-time switching system or a stochastic hybrid system (and sometimes also known as iterated function system with place dependent probabilities [1]). Stochastic hybrid systems are extensively used to model practical phenomena where system parameters are subject to sudden changes. These systems have found widespread applications in various disciplines including synthesis of fractals, modeling of biological networks, [12], target tracking [19], communication networks [10], control theory [2, 3, 4] - to name a few. There is a considerable literature addressing classical weak stability questions concerning the existence and uniqueness of invariant measures of iterated function systems, see e.g., [20, 13, 25, 5, 11] and the references therein. Comprehensive sources studying various properties of these systems including results on stability in both continuous and discrete time can be found in [14, 28] (also see the references therein). In most of these works, is often assumed to be a stand-alone finite or countable state-space Markov chains.
We consider a broad class of coupled switching or hybrid systems whose dynamics is described by (SS-1) and (SS-2) with of the form
where and . In other words, satisfies
(3.17) |
where the are -valued random variables. (3.17), for example, includes multiplicative systems of the form
We will make the following assumptions on the above system.
Assumption 3.1.
-
(SS-7)
For , and any ,
for some constants and exponent .
-
(SS-8)
The following growth conditions hold:
-
•
and where
-
•
,
where and -
•
For any , the constants and are finite, and ,where the above constants are defined as
(3.18)
-
•
-
(SS-9)
The exponents satisfy:
-
•
(a) , or (b) and ;
-
•
, and .
-
•
-
(SS-10)
The are independent -valued random variables with distribution ; for each , is independent of , and for any ,
Proposition 3.2.
Remark 3.3.
A few comments are in order.
- •
-
•
One scenario where the functions are centered (with respect to the variable ) occurs when considering multiplicative stochastic system driven by zero-mean random variables. Specifically, in such models the are of the form and the are mean zero-random variables. Also notice for these models,
-
•
Suppose that the are not centered in the variable . If , (SS-9) requires that the growth exponent of , . However, this could be extended to the boundary case of (when ) provided the averaged growth constants (c.f. (3.18)) meet certain conditions. If and , then the assertion of Proposition 3.2 is true provided . If and , then the same assertion holds provided .
-
•
Condition (SS-7) is implied by the simpler condition:
Similarly, for many models a stronger (but easier to check) form of the condition (SS-8) , where the ‘constants’ (for ) do not depend on , suffices. In that case the corresponding averaged constants (given by (3.18)) are of course given by , and are therefore trivially finite.
-
•
One common example of is or for some unitary operator . If , then centered , that is, , and the condition on the corresponding growth exponent is trivially satisfied.
-
•
Clearly, , where recall that and are the growth rates of (centered ) and , respectively. In some models, without any other information or suitable estimates on , may just have to be taken the same as , in which case condition (SS-9) implies that the above result on uniform bounds on moments applies to systems for which (and not ). However, in some other models the optimal growth rate of can indeed be lower than that of . For example, as we noted before for the function , if , then (that is, in particular, ), and this along with Theorem 2.8 leads to Corollary 3.4 about Harris ergodicty of a large class of multiplicative Markovian systems.
Proof of Proposition 3.2.
Besides the different parameters in Assumption 3.1, other constants appearing in various estimates below will be denoted by ’s. They will not depend on but may depend on the parameters of the system.
For the proof we will only consider the case of (SS-9)-(a), where ; the proofs in the cases of (SS-9)-(b) and the second point in Remark 3.3 follow from (3.21) and some minor modification of the arguments. For each , define the functions and by
(recall that is the distribution measure of ), and notice that by (SS-8) and (SS-10) for any ,
(3.19) |
where (recall ). It now easily follows that and satisfy the following growth conditions:
for some functions and (depending on ), where for (see (3.18) for definition of ). Consequently, for any
Also,
(3.20) |
Now writing , we have
Denoting the term by , we have
Also by Cauchy-Schwartz inequality, (3.19) and (3.20)
and similarly,
Hence, on
(3.21) |
Since by (SS-9) it follows from the above inequality that we can choose large enough so that for ,
Also notice that choosing we have for
Therefore for ,
Because of assumption (SS-9), notice that
In either case, there exist a constant , and a sufficiently large , such that
(3.22) |
Next, notice that
Hence,
(3.23) | ||||
where . Since , for large enough , we have . It now follows from Theorem 2.2 (using ) that for any , . Since is arbitrarily large, the assertion follows.
If are centered, that is, if , then of course can be taken to be for all , and from (3.21) , . Consequently, we do not need to have .
∎
Corollary 3.4.
Consider the class of -adapted Markov processes taking values in , whose dynamics is defined by
(3.24) |
where , are continuous functions, and . Assume that
-
(M-1)
, and satisfy the growth conditions (a) for , (b) and (c)
-
(M-2)
for some constant and exponent ,
-
(M-3)
the exponents satisfy: (a) , or and ; (b) ;
-
(M-4)
the are i.i.d -valued random variables with density with respect to Lebesgue measure, ; for all , , and for each , ;
-
(M-5)
for some and ,
Proof.
Since and are continuous, it follows by the dominated convergence theorem that is weak-Feller. From the assumption (M-5), it follows that is positive definite (in particular, non singular), and det. Note that admits a density . Specifically,
where is the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse (in particular, right inverse) of . Moreover, since a.s, for each , a.s in (with respect to ), and consequently, is -irreducible. This shows that Condition (2.8-d) of Theorem 2.8 holds. The various assertions now follow from Theorem 2.8 and Proposition 3.2 ∎
Remark 3.5.
The condition (M-5) is much weaker than uniform ellipticity condition that is sometimes imposed on for these kinds of models - the latter requiring for some , , for all
The above theorem also holds, with some possible minor modifications, for systems of the form (3.24) taking values in other locally compact spaces with admitting a density with respect to the Haar measure. In particular, for such systems taking values in a countable state space like or , notice that the transition probability mass function (density with respect to counting measure) naturally exists and , that is, the bound on in condition (2.8-d) of Theorem 2.8 is trivially satisfied. Hence condition (M-5) in Corollary 3.4 is not needed in this case. However, depending on the specific model, one might still require to have full row rank for establishing irreducibility of the chain.
As an important application, the above corollary can be used to establish ergodicity of numerical schemes of stochastic differential equations (SDEs).
Example 3.6.
Euler-Maruyama scheme for ergodic SDEs: Consider the SDE
and suppose that is ergodic with invariant / equilibrium distribution - which is typically unknown. Approximating this equilibrium distribution is an important computational problem in various areas including statistical physics, machine learning, mathematical finance etc. Since numerically solving the corresponding (stationary) Kolomogorov PDE for is computationally expensive even when the dimension is as low as , one commonly resorts to discretization schemes like the Euler-Maruyama method:
Here the are iid -random variables, and is a partition of with - the step size of discretization. However, the use of such discretization techniques in approximating is justified provided one can establish (a) ergodicity of the discretized chain with a unique invariant distribution , and (b) convergence of to as . This is a hard problem involving infinite time horizon, and usual error analysis of Euler-Maruyama schemes, which has of course been well studied in the literature, is not useful here, as they are over finite time intervals. In comparison, much less is available on theoretical error analyses of these types of infinite-time horizon approximation problems, and some important results in this direction have been obtained by Talay [27, 26, 7]. A recent paper [6] (also see the references therein for more background on the problem) conducts a thorough large deviation error analysis of the problem in an appropriate scaling regime.
This short example do not attempt to address both the points (a) and (b) of this problem as that requires a separate paper-long treatment. Here, we are only interested in the point (a) above - which is ergodicity of the discretized chain . It is well known that ergodicity of does not guarantee the ergodicity of the discretized chain . Discretization can destroy the underlying Lyapunov structure of an ergodic SDE!
In [27, 26] among several other important results, Talay et al. in particular showed that the chain is ergodic with unique invariant measure and as for any such that and all its derivatives have polynomial growth under the assumption (i) , for , (ii) and are with bounded derivatives of all order and (iii) is uniformly elliptic and bounded. An application of Corollary 3.4 shows that this result can be significantly improved with stronger convergence results under weaker hypothesis (c.f (M-1) -(M-5)). In particular, uniform ellipticity and boundedness conditions on , which are quite restrictive for many models, can be removed.
3.2. Moment stability of linear stochastic control systems
Consider the system
(3.25) |
We are interested in the problem of finding conditions under which a linear stochastic system with possibly unbounded additive stochastic noise is globally stabilizable with bounded control inputs . Stabilization of stochastic linear systems with bounded control is a topic of significant interest in control engineering because of its importance in diverse fields; suboptimal control strategies such as receding-horizon control, and rollout algorithms, among others, can be easily constructed incorporating such constraints, and have become popular in applications. Here we simply refer to [24] and references therein for a detailed background on this topic.
Of course, boundedness of some moments of the noise component is necessary for attaining (moment) stability of the system. Specifically, we consider the following problem:
Problem: Suppose . We consider admissible possible -history dependent control policies of the type so that , and for every , . Given and , find an admissible policy with control authority , such that the system (3.25) with is -th moment stable, that is, for every initial condition , .
It is known that mean square boundedness holds for systems with bounded controls where is Schur stable, that is, all eigenvalues of are contained in the open unit disk (the proof uses Foster-Lyapunov techniques from [15]). In the more general framework, under the assumption that the pair is only stabilizable (which in particular allows the eigenvalues of to lie on the closed unit disk), [24] shows that there exist a -history dependent control policy that ensures moment stability of (3.25), provided the control authority is chosen sufficiently large. It was conjectured in [24], that the lower bound on can possibly be lifted with newer techniques, and here we demonstrate that is indeed the case. The following result is an easy corollary of Proposition 3.2. For simplicity, we assume that is orthogonal and is reachable in -steps. The steps from there to the more general case are similar to that in [24]. In case has full row rank, it will follow that can be taken to be , that is, the resulting policy is stationary feedback.
Proposition 3.7.
Consider the system defined by (3.25). Suppose that is orthogonal and the pair is reachable in steps (that is, , where ). Then for any , there exists a -history dependent policy such that given , for some functions where for , and for which for any .
Proof.
Define , and notice that by iterating (3.25) we get
Notice that and for some constant . Since has full row rank, it has a right inverse . Define
and choose , where is such that This yields the system
Since for , (recall that is orthogonal), we have from Proposition 3.2 that there exists a constant such that
It is now immediate by a sequential argument that for any , where .
Notice that the original controls are defined
where the matrices , are defined by
In particular, from the state at time , the present and the next controls can be computed. ∎
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