Bisimilar control affine systems

Paulo Tabuada, George J. Pappas

Abstract: The notion of bisimulation plays a very important role in theoretical computer science where it provides several notions of equivalence between models of computation. These equivalences are in turn used to simplify analysis and synthesis for these models. In system theory, a similar notion is also of interest in order to develop modular analysis and design tools for purely continuous or hybrid control systems. We introduce two notions of bisimulation for nonlinear systems. We present a differential-algebraic characterization of these notions and show that bisimilar systems of different dimensions are obtained by factoring out certain invariant distributions. Furthermore, we also show that all bisimilar systems of different dimension are of this form.