  In this paper, we further develop a recently proposed control method to
switch a bistable system between its steady states using temporal pulses. The
motivation for using pulses comes from biomedical and biological applications
(e.g. synthetic biology), where it is generally difficult to build feedback
control systems due to technical limitations in sensing and actuation. The
original framework was derived for monotone systems and all the extensions
relied on monotone systems theory. In contrast, we introduce the concept of
switching function which is related to eigenfunctions of the so-called Koopman
operator subject to a fixed control pulse. Using the level sets of the
switching function we can (i) compute the set of all pulses that drive the
system toward the steady state in a synchronous way and (ii) estimate the time
needed by the flow to reach an epsilon neighborhood of the target steady state.
Additionally, we show that for monotone systems the switching function is also
monotone in some sense, a property that can yield efficient algorithms to
compute it. This observation recovers and further extends the results of the
original framework, which we illustrate on numerical examples inspired by
biological applications.
