Amaury Pouly

Nathanaël Fijalkow, Joël Ouaknine, Amaury Pouly et al.

We consider the decidability of state-to-state reachability in linear time-invariant control systems over discrete time. We analyse this problem with respect to the allowable control sets, which in general are assumed to be defined by boolean combinations of linear inequalities. Decidability of the version of the reachability problem in which control sets are affine subspaces of $\mathbb{R}^n$ is a fundamental result in control theory. Our first result is that reachability is undecidable if the set of controls is a finite union of affine subspaces. We also consider versions of the reachability problem in which (i)~the set of controls consists of a single affine subspace together with the origin and (ii)~the set of controls is a convex polytope. In these two cases we respectively show that the reachability problem is as hard as Skolem's Problem and the Positivity Problem for linear recurrence sequences (whose decidability has been open for several decades). Our main contribution is to show decidability of a version of the reachability problem in which control sets are convex polytopes, under certain spectral assumptions on the transition matrix.

Olivier Bournez, Amaury Pouly

An astonishing fact was established by Lee A. Rubel (1981): there exists a fixed non-trivial fourth-order polynomial differential algebraic equation (DAE) such that for any positive continuous function $φ$ on the reals, and for any positive continuous function $ε(t)$, it has a $\mathcal{C}^\infty$ solution with $| y(t) - φ(t) | < ε(t)$ for all $t$. Lee A. Rubel provided an explicit example of such a polynomial DAE. Other examples of universal DAE have later been proposed by other authors. However, Rubel's DAE \emph{never} has a unique solution, even with a finite number of conditions of the form $y^{(k_i)}(a_i)=b_i$. The question whether one can require the solution that approximates $φ$ to be the unique solution for a given initial data is a well known open problem [Rubel 1981, page 2], [Boshernitzan 1986, Conjecture 6.2]. In this article, we solve it and show that Rubel's statement holds for polynomial ordinary differential equations (ODEs), and since polynomial ODEs have a unique solution given an initial data, this positively answers Rubel's open problem. More precisely, we show that there exists a \textbf{fixed} polynomial ODE such that for any $φ$ and $ε(t)$ there exists some initial condition that yields a solution that is $ε$-close to $φ$ at all times. In particular, the solution to the ODE is necessarily analytic, and we show that the initial condition is computable from the target function and error function.

Olivier Bournez, Daniel S. Graça, Amaury Pouly

In this paper we prove that computing the solution of an initial-value problem $\dot{y}=p(y)$ with initial condition $y(t_0)=y_0\in\R^d$ at time $t_0+T$ with precision $e^{-μ}$ where $p$ is a vector of polynomials can be done in time polynomial in the value of $T$, $μ$ and $Y=\sup_{t_0\leqslant u\leqslant T}\infnorm{y(u)}$. Contrary to existing results, our algorithm works for any vector of polynomials $p$ over any bounded or unbounded domain and has a guaranteed complexity and precision. In particular we do not assume $p$ to be fixed, nor the solution to lie in a compact domain, nor we assume that $p$ has a Lipschitz constant.

Marcelo Forets, Amaury Pouly

We revisit the method of Carleman linearization for systems of ordinary differential equations with polynomial right-hand sides. This transformation provides an approximate linearization in a higher-dimensional space through the exact embedding of polynomial nonlinearities into an infinite-dimensional linear system, which is then truncated to obtain a finite-dimensional representation with an additive error. To the best of our knowledge, no explicit calculation of the error bound has been studied. In this paper, we propose two strategies to obtain a time-dependent function that locally bounds the truncation error. In the first approach, we proceed by iterative backwards-integration of the truncated system. However, the resulting error bound requires an a priori estimate of the norm of the exact solution for the given time horizon. To overcome this difficulty, we construct a combinatorial approach and solve it using generating functions, obtaining a local error bound that can be computed effectively.

Hugo Bazille, Olivier Bournez, Walid Gomaa et al.

Reachability for piecewise affine systems is known to be undecidable, starting from dimension $2$. In this paper we investigate the exact complexity of several decidable variants of reachability and control questions for piecewise affine systems. We show in particular that the region to region bounded time versions leads to $NP$-complete or co-$NP$-complete problems, starting from dimension $2$. We also prove that a bounded precision version leads to $PSPACE$-complete problems.

Amaury Pouly

In this note, we extend the result of \cite{PoulyG16} about the complexity of solving polynomial differential equations over unbounded domains to work with non-rational input. In order to deal with arbitrary input, we phrase the result in framework of Conputable Analysis \cite{Ko91}. As a side result, we also get a uniform result about complexity of the operator, and not just about the solution.