Infinity-norm-based Input-to-State-Stable Long Short-Term Memory networks: a thermal systems perspective

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have shown remarkable performances in system identification, particularly in nonlinear dynamical systems such as thermal processes. However, stability remains a critical challenge in practical applications: although the underlying process may be intrinsically stable, there may be no guarantee that the resulting RNN model captures this behavior. This paper addresses the stability issue by deriving a sufficient condition for Input-to-State Stability based on the infinity-norm (ISS∞) for Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. The obtained condition depends on fewer network parameters compared to prior works. A ISS∞-promoted training strategy is developed, incorporating a penalty term in the loss function that encourages stability and an ad hoc early stopping approach. The quality of LSTM models trained via the proposed approach is validated on a thermal system case study, where the ISS∞-promoted LSTM outperforms both a physics-based model and an ISS∞-promoted Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) network while also surpassing non-ISS∞-promoted LSTM and GRU RNNs.