Piecewise contractions (PCs) are piecewise smooth maps that decrease the distance between pairs of points in the same domain of continuity. The dynamics of a variety of systems is described by PCs. During the last decade, much effort has been devoted to proving that in parameterized families of one-dimensional PCs, the $\omega $-limit set of a typical PC consists of finitely many periodic orbits while there exist atypical PCs with Cantor $\omega $-limit sets. In this article, we extend these results to the multi-dimensional case. More precisely, we provide criteria to show that an arbitrary family $\{f_{\mu }\}_{\mu \in U}$ of locally bi-Lipschitz piecewise contractions $f_\mu :X\to X$ defined on a compact metric space X is asymptotically periodic for Lebesgue almost every parameter $\mu $ running over an open subset U of the M-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb {R}^M$. As a corollary of our results, we prove that piecewise affine contractions of $\mathbb {R}^d$ defined in generic polyhedral partitions are asymptotically periodic.

We study the asymptotic dynamics of piecewise-contracting maps defined on a compact interval. For maps that are not necessarily injective, but have a finite number of local extrema and discontinuity points, we prove the existence of a decomposition of the support of the asymptotic dynamics into a finite number of minimal components. Each component is either a periodic orbit or a minimal Cantor set and such that the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}$ -limit set of (almost) every point in the interval is exactly one of these components. Moreover, we show that each component is the $\unicode[STIX]{x1D714}$ -limit set, or the closure of the orbit, of a one-sided limit of the map at a discontinuity point or at a local extremum.