Controllability of positive systems by positive inputs arises naturally in applications where both external and internal variables must remain positive for all time. In many applications, particularly in population biology, the need for positive inputs is often overly restrictive. Relaxing this requirement, the notion of positive state controllability of positive systems is introduced. A connection between positive state controllability and positive input controllability of a related system is established and used to obtain Kalman-like controllability criteria. In doing so we aim to encourage further study in this underdeveloped area.

We present a novel management methodology for restocking a declining population. The strategy uses integral control, a concept ubiquitous in control theory which has not been applied to population dynamics. Integral control is based on dynamic feedback-using measurements of the population to inform management strategies and is robust to model uncertainty, an important consideration for ecological models. We demonstrate from first principles why such an approach to population management is suitable via theory and examples.

Abstract. Pest management is vitally important for modern arable farming, but models for pest species are often highly uncertain. In the context of pest management, control actions are naturally described by a nonlinear feedback that is generally unknown, which thus motivates a robust control approach. We argue that adaptive approaches are well suited for the management of pests and propose a simple high-gain adaptive tuning mechanism so that the nonlinear feedback achieves exponential stabilization. Furthermore, a switched adaptive controller is proposed, cycling through a set of given control actions, that also achieves global asymptotic stability. Such a model in practice allows for the possibility of rotating between different courses of management action. In developing our control strategies we appeal to comparison and monotonicity arguments. Interestingly, componentwise nonnegativity of the model, combined with an irreducibility assumption, implies that several issues typically associated with high-gain adaptive controllers do not arise and usual high-gain structural assumptions are not required.

We consider the inclusion of a static anti-windup component in a continuous-time low-gain integral controller in feedback with a multi-input multi-output stable linear system subject to an input nonlinearity (from a class of functions that includes componentwise diagonal saturation). We demonstrate that the output of the closedloop system asymptotically tracks every constant reference vector which is "feasible" in a natural sense, provided that the integrator gain is sufficiently small. Robustness properties of the proposed control scheme are investigated and three examples are discussed in detail.

We consider forced Lur’e systems in which the linear dynamic component is an infinite-dimensional well-posed system. Numerous physically motivated delay and partial differential equations are known to belong to this class of infinite-dimensional systems. We present refinements of recent incremental input-to-state stability results (Guiver in SIAM J Control Optim 57:334–365, 2019) and use them to derive convergence results for trajectories generated by Stepanov almost periodic inputs. In particular, we show that the incremental stability conditions guarantee that for every Stepanov almost periodic input there exists a unique pair of state and output signals which are almost periodic and Stepanov almost periodic, respectively. The almost periods of the state and output signals are shown to be closely related to the almost periods of the input, and a natural module containment result is established. All state and output signals generated by the same Stepanov almost periodic input approach the almost periodic state and the Stepanov almost periodic output in a suitable sense, respectively, as time goes to infinity. The sufficient conditions guaranteeing incremental input-to-state stability and the existence of almost periodic state and Stepanov almost periodic output signals are reminiscent of the conditions featuring in well-known absolute stability criteria such as the complex Aizerman conjecture and the circle criterion.