Model Order Reduction Based on Semidefinite Programming

The main topic of this PhD thesis is complexity reduction of linear time-invariant models. The complexity in such systems is measured by the number of differential equations forming the dynamical system. This number is called the order of the system. Order reduction is typically used as a tool to model complex systems, the simulation of which takes considerable time and/or has overwhelming memory requirements. Any model reflects an approximation of a real world system. Therefore, it is reasonable to sacrifice some model accuracy in order to obtain a simpler representation. Once a low-order model is obtained, the simulation becomes computationally cheaper, which saves time and resources. A low-order model still has to be "similar" to the full order one in some sense. There are many ways of measuring "similarity" and, typically, such a measure is chosen depending on the application. Three different settings of model order reduction were investigated in the thesis. The first one is H infinity model order reduction, i.e., the distance between two models is measured by the H infinity norm. Although, the problem has been tackled by many researchers, all the optimal solutions are yet to be found. However, there are a large number of methods, which solve suboptimal problems and deliver accurate approximations. Recently, research community has devoted more attention to large-scale systems and computationally scalable extensions of existing model reduction techniques. The algorithm developed in the thesis is based on the frequency response samples matching. For a large class of systems the computation of the frequency response samples can be done very efficiently. Therefore, the developed algorithm is relatively computationally cheap. The proposed algorithm can be seen as a computationally scalable extension to the well-known Hankel model reduction, which is known to deliver very accurate solutions. One of the reasons for such an assessment is that the relaxation employed in the proposed algorithm is tightly related to the one used in Hankel model reduction. Numerical simulations also show that the accuracy of the method is comparable to the Hankel model reduction one. The second part of the thesis is devoted to parameterized model order reduction. A parameterized model is essentially a family of models which depend on certain design parameters. The model reduction goal in this setting is to approximate the whole family of models for all values of parameters. The main motivation for such a model reduction setting is design of a model with an appropriate set of parameters. In order to make a good choice of parameters, the models need to be simulated for a large set of parameters. After inspecting the simulation results a model can be picked with suitable frequency or step responses. Parameterized model reduction significantly simplifies this procedure. The proposed algorithm for parameterized model reduction is a straightforward extension of the one described above. The proposed algorithm is applicable to linear parameter-varying systems modeling as well. Finally, the third topic is modeling interconnections of systems. In this thesis an interconnection is a collection of systems (or subsystems) connected in a typical block-diagram. In order to avoid confusion, throughout the thesis the entire model is called a supersystem, as opposed to subsystems, which a supersystem consists of. One of the specific cases of structured model reduction is controller reduction. In this problem there are two subsystems: the plant and the controller. Two directions of model reduction of interconnected systems are considered: model reduction in the nu-gap metric and structured model reduction. To some extent, using the nu-gap metric makes it possible to model subsystems without considering the supersystem at all. This property can be exploited for extremely large supersystems for which some forms of analysis (evaluating stability, computing step response, etc.) are intractable. However, a more systematic way of modeling is structured model reduction. There, the objective is to approximate certain subsystems in such a way that crucial characteristics of the given supersystem, such as stability, structure of interconnections, frequency response, are preserved. In structured model reduction all subsystems are taken into account, not only the approximated ones. In order to address structured model reduction, the supersystem is represented in a coprime factor form, where its structure also appears in coprime factors. Using this representation the problem is reduced to H infinity model reduction, which is addressed by the presented framework. All the presented methods are validated on academic or known benchmark problems. Since all the methods are based on semidefinite programming, adding new constraints is a matter of formulating a constraint as a semidefinite one. A number of extensions are presented, which illustrate the power of the approach. Properties of the methods are discussed throughout the thesis while some remaining problems conclude the manuscript. (Less)