Decentralized Polya's algorithm for stability analysis of large-scale nonlinear systems

In this paper, we introduce an algorithm to decentralize the computation associated with the stability analysis of systems of nonlinear differential equations with a large number of states. The algorithm applies to dynamical systems with polynomial vector fields and checks the local asymptotic stability on hypercubes. We perform the analysis in three steps. First, by applying a multi-simplex version of Polya's theorem to some Lyapunov inequalities, we derive a sequence of stability conditions of increasing accuracy in the form of structured linear matrix inequalities. Then, we design a set-up algorithm to decentralize the computation of the coefficients of the LMIs, among the processing units of a parallel environment. Finally, we use a parallel primal-dual central path algorithm, specifically designed to solve the structured LMIs given by the set-up algorithm. For a sufficiently large number of available processors, the per-core computational complexity of the resulting algorithm is fixed with the accuracy. The algorithm demonstrates a near-linear speed-up in numerical experiments.