Optimal multirate sampling in symbolic models for incrementally stable switched systems

Methods for computing approximately bisimilar symbolic models for incrementally stable switched systems are often based on discretization of time and space, where the value of time and space sampling parameters must be carefully chosen in order to achieve a desired precision. These approaches can result in symbolic models that have a very large number of transitions, especially when the time sampling, and thus the space sampling parameters are small. In this paper, we present an approach to the computation of symbolic models for switched systems with dwell-time constraints using multirate time sampling, where the period of symbolic transitions is a multiple of the control (i.e. switching) period. We show that all the multirate symbolic models, resulting from the proposed construction, are approximately bisimilar to the original incrementally stable switched system with the precision depending on the sampling parameters, and the sampling factor between transition and control periods. The main contribution of the paper is the explicit determination of the optimal sampling factor, which minimizes the number of transitions in the class of proposed symbolic models for a prescribed precision. Interestingly, we prove that this optimal sampling factor is mainly determined by the state space dimension and the number of modes of the switched system. Finally, an illustration of the proposed approach is shown on an example, which shows the benefit of multirate symbolic models in reducing the computational cost of abstraction-based controller synthesis. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.