On the stabilizability of continuous-time compartmental switched systems

In this paper we introduce continuous-time positive switched systems, switching among autonomous compartmental subsystems. For this class of systems a set of interesting necessary and sufficient conditions for stabilizabilty is provided, based on the compartmental property of the subsystem matrices. In particular, it is shown that, differently from the general (i.e. noncompartmental) case, stabilizability is equivalent to the existence of a Hurwitz convex combination of the subsystem matrices.