Efficient polyhedral enclosures for the reachable set of nonlinear control systems

This work presents a general theory for the construction of a polyhedral outer approximation of the reachable set (“polyhedral bounds”) of a dynamic system subject to time-varying inputs and uncertain initial conditions. This theory is inspired by the efficient methods for the construction of interval bounds based on comparison theorems. A numerically implementable instance of this theory leads to an auxiliary system of differential equations which can be solved with standard numerical integration methods. Meanwhile, the use of polyhedra provides greater flexibility in defining tight enclosures on the reachable set. These advantages are demonstrated with a few examples, which show that tight bounds can be efficiently computed for general, nonlinear systems. Further, it is demonstrated that the ability to use polyhedra provides a means to meaningfully distinguish between time-varying and constant, but uncertain, inputs.