Control systems on regular time scales and their differential rings

The paper describes an algebraic construction of the inversive differential ring, associated with a nonlinear control system, defined on a nonhomogeneous but regular time scale. The ring of meromorphic functions in system variables is constructed under the assumption that the system is submersive, and equipped with three operators (delta- and nabla-derivatives, and the forward shift operator) whose properties are studied. The formalism developed unifies the existing theories for continuous- and discrete-time nonlinear systems, and accommodates also the case of non-uniformly sampled systems. Compared with the homogeneous case the main difficulties are noncommutativity of delta (nabla) derivative and shift operators and the fact that the additional time variable t appears in the definition of the differential ring. The latter yields that the new variables of the inversive closure, depending on t, have to be chosen to be smooth at each dense point t of the time scale.