On the stability and control of nonlinear dynamical systems via vector Lyapunov functions

Vector Lyapunov theory has been developed to weaken the hypothesis of standard Lyapunov theory in order to enlarge the class of Lyapunov functions that can be used for analyzing system stability. In this paper, we extend the theory of vector Lyapunov functions by constructing a generalized comparison system whose vector field can be a function of the comparison system states as well as the nonlinear dynamical system states. Furthermore, we present a generalized convergence result which, in the case of a scalar comparison system, specializes to the classical Krasovskii-LaSalle invariant set theorem. In addition, we introduce the notion of a control vector Lyapunov function as a generalization of control Lyapunov functions, and show that asymptotic stabilizability of a nonlinear dynamical system is equivalent to the existence of a control vector Lyapunov function. Moreover, using control vector Lyapunov functions, we construct a universal decentralized feedback control law for a decentralized nonlinear dynamical system that possesses guaranteed gain and sector margins in each decentralized input channel. Furthermore, we establish connections between the recently developed notion of vector dissipativity and optimality of the proposed decentralized feedback control law. Finally, the proposed control framework is used to construct decentralized controllers for large-scale nonlinear systems with robustness guarantees against full modeling uncertainty.