Observability and controllability of piecewise affine and hybrid systems

Abstract

We prove, in a constructive way, the equivalence between piecewise affine systems and a broad class of hybrid systems described by interacting linear dynamics, automata, and propositional logic. By focusing our investigation on the former class, we show through counterexamples that observability and controllability properties cannot be easily deduced from those of the component linear subsystems. Instead, we propose practical numerical tests based on mixed-integer linear programming.