Balanced Truncation of Linear Second-Order Systems: A Hamiltonian Approach

We present a formal procedure for structure-preserving model reduction of linear second-order and Hamiltonian control problems that appear in a variety of physical contexts, e.g., vibromechanical systems or electrical circuit design. Typical balanced truncation methods that project onto the subspace of the largest Hankel singular values fail to preserve the problem’s physical structure and may suffer from lack of stability. In this paper we adopt the framework of generalized Hamiltonian systems that covers the class of relevant problems and that allows for a generalization of balanced truncation to second-order problems. It turns out that the Hamiltonian structure, stability and passivity are preserved if the truncation is done by imposing a holonomic constraint on the system rather than standard Galerkin projection.