Sensitivity to Cumulative Perturbations for a Class of Piecewise Constant Hybrid Systems

Abstract: We consider a class of continuous-time hybrid dynamical systems that correspond to subgradient flows of a piecewise linear and convex potential function with finitely many pieces, and which include the fluid-level dynamics of the Max-Weight scheduling policy as a special case. We study the effect of an external disturbance/perturbation on the state trajectory, and establish that the magnitude of this effect can be bounded by a constant multiple of the integral of the perturbation.