Gramian-Based Model Reduction of Directed Networks

Abstract: This paper investigates a model reduction problem for linear directed network systems, in which the interconnections among the vertices are described by general weakly connected digraphs. First, the definitions of pseudo controllability and observability Gramians are proposed for semistable systems, and their solutions are characterized by Lyapunov-like equations. Then, we introduce a concept of vertex clusterability to guarantee the boundedness of the approximation error and use the newly proposed Gramians to facilitate the evaluation of the dissimilarity of each pair of vertices. An clustering algorithm is thereto provided to generate an appropriate graph clustering, whose characteristic matrix is employed as the projections in the Petrov-Galerkin reduction framework. The obtained reduced-order system preserves the weakly connected directed network structure, and the approximation error is computed by the pseudo Gramians. Finally, the efficiency of the proposed approach is illustrated by numerical examples.