Instability Margin Analysis for Parametrized LTI Systems with Application to Repressilator

Abstract: This paper is concerned with a robust instability analysis for the single-input-single-output unstable linear time-invariant (LTI) system under dynamic perturbations. The nominal system itself is possibly perturbed by the static gain of the uncertainty, which would be the case when a nonlinear uncertain system is linearized around an equilibrium point. We define the robust instability radius as the smallest $H_\infty$ norm of the stable linear perturbation that stabilizes the nominal system. There are two main theoretical results: one is on a partial characterization of unperturbed nominal systems for which the robust instability radius can be calculated exactly, and the other is a numerically tractable procedure for calculating the exact robust instability radius for nominal systems parametrized by a perturbation parameter. The results are applied to the repressilator in synthetic biology, where hyperbolic instability of a unique equilibrium guarantees the persistence of oscillation phenomena in the global sense, and the effectiveness of our linear robust instability analysis is confirmed by numerical simulations.