Stability of Positive Switched Linear Systems: Weak Excitation and Robustness to Time-Varying Delay

This article investigates the stability of positive switched linear systems. We start from motivating examples and focus on the case when each switched subsystem is marginally stable (in the sense that all the eigenvalues of the subsystem matrix are in the closed left-half plane with those on the imaginary axis simple) instead of asymptotically stable. A weak excitation condition is first proposed such that the considered positive switched linear system is exponentially stable. An extension to the case without dwell time assumption is also presented. Then, we study the influence of time-varying delay on the stability of the considered positive switched linear system. We show that the proposed weak excitation condition for the delay-free case is also sufficient for the asymptotic stability of the positive switched linear system under unbounded time-varying delay. In addition, it is shown that the convergence rate is exponential if there exists an upper bound for the delay, irrespective of the magnitude of this bound. The motivating examples are revisited to illustrate the theoretical results.