Nonlinear Balanced Truncation: Part 1 -- Computing Energy Functions

Nonlinear balanced truncation is a model order reduction technique that reduces the dimension of nonlinear systems in a manner that accounts for either open- or closed-loop observability and controllability aspects of the system. Two computational challenges have so far prevented its deployment on large-scale systems: (a) the energy functions required for characterization of controllability and observability are solutions of high-dimensional Hamilton-Jacobi-(Bellman) equations, and (b) efficient model reduction and subsequent reduced-order model (ROM) simulation on the resulting nonlinear balanced manifolds. This work proposes a unifying and scalable approach to the challenge (a) by considering a Taylor series-based approach to solve a class of parametrized Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations that are at the core of the balancing approach. The value of a formulation parameter provides either open-loop balancing or a variety of closed-loop balancing options. To solve for coefficients of the Taylor-series approximation to the energy functions, the presented method derives a linear tensor structure and heavily utilizes this to solve structured linear systems with billions of unknowns. The strength and scalability of the algorithm is demonstrated on two semi-discretized partial differential equations, namely the Burgers equation and the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky equation.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure