Ricerc@Sapienza

In some applications one is interested in having a state–space realization with nonnegative matrices (positive realization) of a given transfer function and it is known that such a realization may have a dimension strictly larger than the order of the transfer function itself. Moreover, in most cases, it is desirable to have a realization with minimal dimension. Unfortunately, it is not known, to date, how

The nonnegative inverse eigenvalue problem is the problem of determining necessary and sufficient conditions for a multiset of complex numbers to be the spectrum of a nonnegative real matrix of size equal to the cardinality of the multiset itself. The problem is longstanding and proved to be very difficult so that several variations have been defined by considering particular classes of multisets and nonnegative real matrices. In this paper, a novel variation of the problem is proposed.

In some applications, one is interested in having a state–space realization with nonnegative matrices (positive realization) of a given transfer function and it is known that such a realization may have a dimension strictly larger than the order of the transfer function itself. The aim of this letter is to provide a lower bound on the minimum dimension of a positive realization taking into account some spectral properties of nonnegative matrices.