Characterization of the ordering of path-complete stability certificates with addition-closed templates

Abstract

As part of the development of Lyapunov techniques for cyber-physical systems, we study and compare graph-based stability certificates with respect to their conservatism. Previous work have highlighted the dependence of this ordering with respect to the properties of the chosen template of candidate Lyapunov functions. We extend here previous results from the literature to the case of templates closed under addition, as for instance the set of quadratic functions. In this context, we provide a characterization of the ordering, using an approach based on abstract operations on graphs, called lifts, which encode in a combinatorial way the algebraic properties of the chosen template. We finally provide a numerical method to algorithmically check the ordering relation.