Over-approximating reachable tubes of linear time-varying systems

Abstract: We present a method to over-approximate reachable tubes over compact time-intervals, for linear continuous-time, time-varying control systems whose initial states and inputs are subject to compact convex uncertainty. The method uses numerical approximations of transition matrices, is convergent of first order, and assumes the ability to compute with compact convex sets in finite dimension. We also present a variant that applies to the case of zonotopic uncertainties, uses only linear algebraic operations, and yields zonotopic over-approximations. The performance of the latter variant is demonstrated on an example.