On the Tightness of the Balanced Truncation Error Bound with an Application to Arrowhead Systems

Balanced truncation model reduction for linear systems yields reduced-order models that satisfy a well-known error bound in terms of a system's Hankel singular values. This bound is known to hold with equality under certain conditions, such as when the full-order system is state-space symmetric.

In this work, we derive more general conditions in which the balanced truncation error bound holds with equality. We show that this holds for single-input, single-output systems that exhibit a generalized type of state-space symmetry based on the sign parameters corresponding to a system's Hankel singular values. We prove an additional result that shows how to determine this state-space symmetry from the arrowhead realization of a system, if available. In particular, we provide a formula for the sign parameters of an arrowhead system in terms of the off-diagonal entries of its arrowhead realization.

We then illustrate these results with an example of an arrowhead system arising naturally in power systems modeling that motivated our study.