Finding the nearest $\Omega$-stable pencil with Riemannian optimization

This paper considers the problem of finding the nearest $\Omega$-stable pencil to a given square pencil $A+xB \in \mathbb{C}^{n \times n}$, where a pencil is called $\Omega$-stable if it is regular and all of its eigenvalues belong to the closed set $\Omega$. We propose a new method, based on the Schur form of a matrix pair and Riemannian optimization over the manifold $U(n) \times U(n)$, that is, the Cartesian product of the unitary group with itself. While the developed theory holds for any closed set $\Omega$, we focus on two cases that are the most common in applications: Hurwitz stability and Schur stability. For these cases, we develop publicly available efficient implementations. Numerical experiments show that the resulting algorithm outperforms existing methods.