Computing robustness of system properties with respect to structured real matrix perturbations

The authors investigate the problem of computing the minimum norm parameter variation that makes some system property fail to hold. They outline an approach which allows several similar system properties to be treated within the same framework. The allowable perturbations are characterized by linear spaces. The system property is characterized by the rank of a matrix pencil, or a collection of matrix pencils. A descent algorithm is formulated based on singular value techniques which converges to a local minimum for a solution of the problem