Quantitative Resilience of Linear Driftless Systems

Abstract

This paper introduces the notion of quantitative resilience of a control system. Following prior work, we study systems enduring a loss of control authority over some of their actuators. Such a malfunction results in actuators producing possibly undesirable inputs over which the controller has real-time readings but no control. By definition, a system is resilient if it can still reach a target after a partial loss of control authority. However, after a malfunction, a resilient system might be significantly slower to reach a target compared to its initial capabilities. We quantify this loss of performance through the new concept of quantitative resilience. We define such a metric as the maximal ratio of the minimal times required to reach any target for the initial and malfunctioning systems. Naive computation of quantitative resilience directly from the definition is a complex task as it requires solving four nested, possibly nonlinear, optimization problems. The main technical contribution of this work is to provide an efficient method to compute quantitative resilience. Relying on control theory and on two novel geometric results we reduce the computation of quantitative resilience to a single linear optimization problem. We illustrate our method on two numerical examples: an opinion dynamics scenario and a trajectory controller for low-thrust spacecrafts.