A small gain condition for interconnections of ISS systems with mixed ISS characterizations

Abstract

We consider interconnected nonlinear systems with external inputs, where each of the subsystems is assumed to be input-to-state stable (ISS). Sufficient conditions of small gain type are provided guaranteeing that the interconnection is ISS with respect to the external input. To this end we extend recently obtained small gain theorems to a more general type of interconnections. The small gain theorem provided here is applicable to situations where the ISS conditions are formulated differently for each subsystem and are either given in the maximization or the summation sense. Furthermore it is shown that the conditions are compatible in the sense that it is always possible to transform sum formulations to maximum formulations without destroying a given small gain condition. An example shows the advantages of our results in comparison with the known ones.