A detailed comparative analysis of all practical algorithms to compute lower bounds on the structured singular value

μ analysis is one of the most efficient techniques to evaluate the stability margins and the performance levels of linear time-invariant systems in the presence of structured time-invariant uncertainties. The exact computation of the structured singular value μ is known to be NP hard in the general case, but several methods have been developed in the last 30 years to compute accurate and reliable bounds. In this paper, all existing μ lower bound algorithms are reviewed and the most relevant ones are evaluated on a wide set of real-world benchmarks, corresponding to various fields of application, system dimensions and structures of the uncertainties. The results are thoroughly analyzed and simple improvements to the existing algorithms are proposed to approach the exact value of μ with a reasonable computation cost. Conclusions show that non-conservative values can be obtained in almost all cases. A brief extension to skew-μ analysis confirms the good results obtained in the classical μ case.