Passivity and complementarity

This paper studies the interaction between the notions of passivity of systems theory and complementarity of mathematical programming in the context of complementarity systems. These systems consist of a dynamical system (given in the form of state space representation) and complementarity relations. We study existence, uniqueness, and nature of solutions for this system class under a passivity assumption on the dynamical part. A complete characterization of the initial states and the inputs for which a solution exists is given. These initial states are called consistent states. For the inconsistent states, we introduce a solution concept in the framework of distributions.