Topological feedback entropy for nonlinear systems

It is well-known in the field of dynamical systems that entropy can be defined rigorously for completely deterministic open-loop systems. However, such definitions have found limited application in engineering, unlike Shannon's statistical entropy. In this paper, it is shown that the problem of communication-limited stabilization is related to the concept of topological entropy, introduced by Adler et al. as a measure of the information rate of a continuous map on a compact topological space. Using similar open cover techniques, the notion of topological feedback entropy (TFE) is defined in this paper and proposed as a measure of the inherent rate at which a map on a noncompact topological space with inputs generates stability information. It is then proven that a topological dynamical plant can be stabilized into a compact set if and only if the data rate in the feedback loop exceeds the TFE of the plant on the set. By taking appropriate limits in a metric space, the concept of local TFE (LTFE) is defined arid it is asserted that a plant is locally uniformly asymptotically stabilizable to a fixed point if and only if the data rate exceeds the plant LTFE at the fixed point. An expression for the LTFE of continuously differentiable plants in Euclidean space is then given.