Constraint Based Computation of Periodic Orbits of Chaotic Dynamical Systems

The chaos theory emerged at the end of the 19th century, and it has given birth to a deep mathematical theory in the 20th century, with a strong practical impact (e.g., weather forecast, turbulence analysis). Periodic orbits play a key role in understanding chaotic systems. Their rigorous computation provides some insights on the chaotic behavior of the system and it enables computer assisted proofs of chaos related properties (e.g., topological entropy). In this paper, we show that the (numerical) constraint programming framework provides a very convenient and efficient method for computing periodic orbits of chaotic dynamical systems: Indeed, the flexibility of CP modeling allows considering various models as well as including additional constraints (e.g., symmetry breaking constraints). Furthermore, the richness of the different solving techniques (tunable local propagators, search strategies, etc.) leads to highly efficient computations. These strengths of the CP framework are illustrated by experimental results on classical chaotic systems from the literature.