TRAX: An approach for the time rational analysis of complex dynamic systems

This paper introduces a theoretical and algorithmic reduced model approach to efficiently evaluate time responses of complex dynamic systems. The proposed approach combines four main components: analytical expressions of the average of the system's transfer functions in the frequency domain, precise and convergent rational approximations of these exact expressions, exact evaluation of these approximations through model reduction in rational Krylov subspaces and semi‐analytical interpolation at just a few frequency points. The resulting algorithmic principles to evaluate the time response of a particular system are relatively straightforward: one first evaluates the response of the system with slight additional damping at a few frequencies and one then projects or reduces the system in the subspace spanned by these responses. The time response of the reduced model implicitly provides a precise evaluation of that of the original system. The properties of the reduced models and the precision of the proposed approach are studied, and applications on complex matrix systems are presented and discussed. While the theory and numerical algorithms are presented in a matrix context, they are also transposable in a continuous functional context. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.