PWATOOLS: A MATLAB toolbox for piecewise-affine controller synthesis

A toolbox for piecewise-affine (PWA) systems called PWATOOLS is introduced in this paper. Numerical control synthesis methodologies for PWA and nonlinear systems have been implemented in this toolbox. Although several Lyapunov-based PWA control synthesis approaches exist in the literature, to the best of our knowledge there is no software toolbox that implements these methods for continuous-time PWA systems that is also capable of analyzing nonlinear systems and synthesizing PWA controllers for them. PWATOOLS is proposed to fill this gap as a software toolbox with the ability to analyze and synthesize PWA controllers for nonlinear systems. The toolbox proposed in this paper has been written to serve as an educational as well as a modeling, analysis and synthesis tool. PWATOOLS uses Yalmip, SeDuMi and PENBMI to find solutions for the sufficient conditions for stability analysis of the models or the synthesis of PWA controllers. An example in active flutter supression illustrates the use of this new toolbox.