Stability of piecewise affine systems with application to chaos stabilization

This paper addresses the stability issue for a class of piecewise affine (PWA) systems, where the state spaces are assumed to be dividable into a certain number of hypercuboid subspaces. By constructing appropriate piecewise continuous Lyapunov functions, several numerically tractable stability criteria are developed for four subclasses of such PWA systems, which allow to recast the switching control problem for the PWA systems as a convex optimization problem. Moreover, the proposed method is applied to switching controller design for (globally and locally) stabilizing the unstable equilibrium points of PWA chaotic systems. Numerical simulations on the chaotic Chua's circuit are presented to verify the theoretical results. © 2007 American Institute of Physics.