Analysis and Synthesis of Interconnected Positive Systems

This paper is concerned with the analysis and synthesis of interconnected systems constructed from heterogeneous positive subsystems and a nonnegative interconnection matrix. We first show that admissibility, to be defined in this paper, is an essential requirement in constructing such interconnected systems. Then, we clarify that the interconnected system is admissible and stable if and only if a Metzler matrix, which is built from the coefficient matrices of positive subsystems and the nonnegative interconnection matrix, is Hurwitz stable. By means of this key result, we further provide several results that characterize the admissibility and stability of the interconnected system in terms of the Frobenius eigenvalue of the interconnection matrix and the weighted $L_{1}$- induced norm of the positive subsystems again to be defined in this paper. Moreover, in the case where every subsystem is SISO, we provide explicit conditions under which the interconnected system has the property of persistence, i.e., its state converges to a unique strictly positive vector (that is known in advance up to a strictly positive constant multiplicative factor) for any nonnegative and nonzero initial state. As an important consequence of this property, we show that the output of the interconnected system converges to a scalar multiple of the right eigenvector of a nonnegative matrix associated with its Frobenius eigenvalue, where the nonnegative matrix is nothing but the interconnection matrix scaled by the steady-stage gains of the positive subsystems. This result is then naturally and effectively applied to formation control of multiagent systems with positive dynamics. This result can be seen as a generalization of a well-known consensus algorithm that has been basically applied to interconnected systems constructed from integrators.