Nonnegative linear systems in the behavioral approach: the autonomous case

Nonnegative linear systems, which have traditionally been investigated with in the state-space framework, are in this paper introduced and analyzed by means of the behavioral approach. Starting from certain definitions and res ults presented in a recent paper [J.W. Nieuwenhuis, Systems Control Lett. 1 (1982) 283], we have explored the general autonomous case, by deriving an extended set of necessary and sufficient conditions for an autonomous behav ior to be nonnegative. In the scalar case, in particular, necessary conditi ons for nonnegativity, which refer to the set of zeros of any polynomial in volved in the kernel description of the behavior have been provided. (C) 20 00 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.