General Inner Approximation of Vector-valued Functions

This paper addresses the problem of evaluating a subset of the range of a vector-valued function. It is based on a work by Goldsztejn and Jaulin which provides methods based on interval analysis to address this problem when the dimension of the domain and co-domain of the function are equal. This paper extends this result to vector-valued functions with domain and co-domain of different dimensions. This extension requires the knowledge of the rank of the Jacobian function on the whole domain. This leads to the sub-problem of extracting an interval sub-matrix of maximum rank from a given interval matrix. Three different techniques leading to approximate solutions of this extraction are proposed and compared.