Spatio-Temporal Decomposition of Sum-of-Squares Programs for the Region of Attraction and Reachability

This letter presents a method for calculating Region of Attraction of a target set (not necessarily an equilibrium) for controlled polynomial dynamical systems, using a hierarchy of semidefinite programming problems (SDPs). Our approach builds on previous work and addresses its main issue, the fast-growing memory demands for solving large-scale SDPs. The main idea in this work is in dissecting the original resource-demanding problem into multiple smaller, interconnected, and easier to solve problems. This is achieved by spatio-temporal splitting akin to methods based on partial differential equations. We show that the splitting procedure retains the convergence and outer-approximation guarantees of the previous work, while achieving higher precision in less time and with smaller memory footprint.