Observability and Determinability Characterizations for Linear Switched Systems in Discrete Time

In this article, we study the observability and determinability for discrete-time linear switched systems. Studies for the observability for this system class are already available in literature, however, we use assume here that the switching signal is known. This leads to less conservative observability conditions (e.g. observability of each individual mode is not necessary for the overall switched system to be observable); in particular, the dependencies of observability on the switching times and the mode sequences are derived; these results are currently not available in the literature on discrete-time switched systems. In addition to observability (which is concerned with recovering the state from the initial time onwards), we also investigate the determinability which is concerned with the ability to reconstruct the state value at the end of the observation interval. We provide several simple examples to illustrate novel features not seen in the continuous time case or for unswitched systems