Probabilistic Robustness Analysis -- Risks, Complexity and Algorithms

Abstract

It is becoming increasingly apparent that probabilistic approaches can overcome conservatism and computational complexity of the classical worst-case deterministic framework and may lead to designs that are actually safer. In this paper we argue that a comprehensive probabilistic robustness analysis requires a detailed evaluation of the robustness function and we show that such evaluation can be performed with essentially any desired accuracy and confidence using algorithms with complexity linear in the dimension of the uncertainty space. Moreover, we show that the average memory requirements of such algorithms are absolutely bounded and well within the capabilities of today's computers. In addition to efficiency, our approach permits control over statistical sampling error and the error due to discretization of the uncertainty radius. For a specific level of tolerance of the discretization error, our techniques provide an efficiency improvement upon conventional methods which is inversely proportional to the accuracy level; i.e., our algorithms get better as the demands for accuracy increase.