Structured and simultaneous Lyapunov functions for system stability problems

Abstract It is shown that many system stability and robustness problems can be reduced to the question of when there is a quadratic Lyapunov function of a certain structure which establishes stability of x = Ax for some appropriate A. The existence of such a Lyapunov function can be determined by solving a convex program. We present several numerical methods for these optimization problems. A simple numerical example is given.