Stability analysis of linear systems subject to regenerative switchings

This paper investigates the stability of switched linear systems whose switching signal is modeled as a stochastic process called a regenerative process. We show that the mean stability of such a switched system is characterized by the spectral radius of a matrix. The matrix is obtained by taking the expectation of the transition matrix of the system on one cycle of the underlying regenerative process. The characterization generalizes Floquet’s theorem for the stability analysis of linear time-periodic systems. We illustrate the result with the stability analysis of a linear system with a failure-prone controller under periodic maintenance.