  This paper applies the Thomas decomposition technique to nonlinear control
systems, in particular to the study of the dependence of the system behavior on
parameters. Thomas' algorithm is a symbolic method which splits a given system
of nonlinear partial differential equations into a finite family of so-called
simple systems which are formally integrable and define a partition of the
solution set of the original differential system. Different simple systems of a
Thomas decomposition describe different structural behavior of the control
system in general. The paper gives an introduction to the Thomas decomposition
method and shows how notions such as invertibility, observability and flat
outputs can be studied. A Maple implementation of Thomas' algorithm is used to
illustrate the techniques on explicit examples.
