Invariance is Compositional for Continuous-time Systems: From Sleekness to Lebesgue Density

Abstract

This work establishes the first bidirectional compositional invariance result: robust forward invariance of a global Cartesian product set is shown to be equivalent to robust forward invariance of each local subsystem under coupling inputs from its neighbors. To facilitate this, we introduce the notion of tangential Lebesgue-density, a new condition that is weaker than classical sleekness but sufficient to ensure that the product of individual tangent cones equals the tangent cone of the product set. This equivalence reduces the curse of dimensionality by allowing the verification of a high-dimensional global system to be decomposed into a series of local sub-checks. The framework's scalability is demonstrated through a DC microgrid numerical example, confirming that the verification complexity grows only linearly with the number of subsystems.