Perturbation-Tolerant Structural Controllability for Linear Systems

Abstract: This paper proposes a notion termed perturbation-tolerant structural controllability (PTSC) to study the generic property of controllability preservation/resilience of structured linear systems under structured perturbations. A structured system is said to be PTSC with respect to a perturbation structure if for almost all controllable realizations of this system, there are no complex-valued perturbations obeying the zero/nonzero pattern prescribed by the perturbation structure that can make the perturbed systems uncontrollable. We prove a generic property in this notion, that for almost all controllable realizations of a structured system, either there exist such structured perturbations rendering the systems uncontrollable, or there are no such perturbations. We present a decomposition-based necessary and sufficient condition for the PTSC of single-input linear systems, whose verification has polynomial time complexity. We then discuss some intuitive graph-theoretic conditions for PTSC. As an application, our results can serve as some feasibility conditions for the conventional structured controllability radius problems from a generic viewpoint.