Model reduction of LFT systems

Abstract

The notion of balanced realizations and balanced truncation model reduction, including guaranteed error bounds, is extended to general Q-stable linear fractional transformations (LFTs). Since both multidimensional and uncertain systems are naturally represented using LFTs, this can be interpreted either as doing state order reduction for multidimensional systems or as uncertainty simplification in the case of uncertain systems. The role of Lyapunov equations in the 1D theory is replaced by linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). All proofs are given in detail as they are very short and greatly simplify even the standard 1D case.