Stability of multi-dimensional switched systems with an application to open multi-agent systems

A multi-dimensional switched system or multi-mode multi-dimensional (M3D) system extends the classic switched system by allowing different subsystem dimensions. The stability problem of the M3D system, whose state transitions at switching instants can be discontinuous due to the dimension-varying feature, is studied. The discontinuous state transition is formulated by an affine map that captures both the dimension variations and the state impulses, with no extra constraint imposed. In the presence of unstable subsystems, the general criteria featuring a series of Lyapunov-like conditions for the practical and asymptotic stability properties of the M3D system are provided under the proposed slow/fast transition-dependent average dwell time framework. Then, by considering linear subsystems, we propose a class of parametric multiple Lyapunov functions to verify the obtained Lyapunov-like stability conditions and explicitly reveal a connection between the practical/asymptotic stability property and the non-vanishing/vanishing property of the impulsive effects in the state transition process. Further, the obtained stability results for the M3D system are applied to the consensus problem of the open multi-agent system (MAS), whose network topology can be switching and size-varying due to the migrations of agents. It shows that through a proper transformation, the seeking of the (practical) consensus performance of the open MAS with disconnected digraphs boils down to that of the (practical) stability property of an M3D system with unstable subsystems. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd