Mathematics Colloquium by Volker Mehrmann

Most real world dynamical systems consist of subsystems from different physical domains, modelled by partial-differential equations, ordinary differential equations, and algebraic equations, combined with input and output connections. To deal with such complex system, in recent years energy based modeling via the class of dissipative port-Hamiltonian (pH) descriptor systems has emerged as a very successful mathematical modeling methodology. The main reasons are that the network based interconnection of pH systems is again pH, Galerkin projection in PDE discretization and model reduction preserve the pH structure and the physical properties are encoded in the geometric properties of the flow as well as the algebraic properties of the equations. Furthermore, dissipative pH systems form a very robust representation under structured perturbations and directly indicate Lyapunov functions for stability analysis.