Computation of continuous and piecewise affine Lyapunov functions by numerical approximations of the Massera construction

Abstract : The numerical construction of Lyapunov functions provides useful information on system behavior. In the Continu-ous and Piecewise Affine (CPA) method, linear programming is used to parameterize a CPA Lyapunov function for continuous nonlinear systems. This method is relatively slow due to the linear program that has to be solved. A recent proposal was to parameterize the CPA Lyapunov function based on a Lyapunov function in a converse Lyapunov theorem by Yoshizawa. In this paper we propose parameterizing CPA Lyapunov functions using a Lyapunov function construction in a classic converse Lyapunov theorem by Massera. We provide the theory for such a parameterization and present several examples to illustrate the utility of this approach.