Transient Adjoint DAE Sensitivities: a Complete, Rigorous, and Numerically Accurate Formulation

Almost all practical systems rely heavily on physical parameters. As a result, parameter sensitivity, or the extent to which perturbations in parameter values affect the state of a system, is intrinsically connected to system design and optimization. We present TADsens, a method for computing the parameter sensitivities of an output of a differential algebraic equation (DAE) system. Specifically, we provide rigorous, insightful theory for adjoint sensitivity computation of DAEs, along with an efficient and numerically well-posed algorithm implemented in Berkeley MAPP. Our theory and implementation advances resolve longstanding issues that have impeded adoption of adjoint transient sensitivities in circuit simulators for over 5 decades. We present results and comparisons on two nonlinear analog circuits. TADsens is numerically well posed and accurate, and faster by a factor of 300 over direct sensitivity computation on a circuit with over 150 unknowns and 600 parameters.