Efficiently computable lower bounds for the p-radius of switching linear systems

This paper proposes novel lower bounds on a quantity called L
^p
-norm joint spectral radius, or in short, p-radius, of a finite set of matrices. Despite its wide range of applications, (for example, to the stability of switching linear systems and the uniqueness of the equilibrium solutions of switching linear economical models), algorithms for computing the p-radius are only available in a very limited number of particular cases. We propose lower bounds that do not require any special structure on matrices and are formulated as the maximal spectral radius of a matrix family generated by weighting matrices via Kronecker products. We show on numerical examples that the proposed lower bounds can largely improve the existing ones.