Logic and compositional verification of hybrid systems

• Authors: André Platzer
• Venue: CAV'11 Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Computer aided verification
• Year: 2011

Hybrid systems are models for complex physical systems and have become a widely used concept for understanding their behavior. Many applications are safety-critical, including car, railway, and air traffic control, robotics, physical-chemical process control, and biomedical devices. Hybrid systems analysis studies how we can build computerised controllers for physical systems which are guaranteed to meet their design goals. The continuous dynamics of hybrid systems can be modeled by differential equations, the discrete dynamics by a combination of discrete state-transitions and conditional execution. The discrete and continuous dynamics interact to form hybrid systems, which makes them quite challenging for verification. In this tutorial, we survey state-of-the-art verification techniques for hybrid systems. In particular, we focus on a coherent logical approach for systematic hybrid systems analysis. We survey theory, practice, and applications, and show how hybrid systems can be verified in the hybrid systems verification tool KeYmaera. KeYmaera has been used successfully to verify safety, reactivity, controllability, and liveness properties, including collision freedom in air traffic, car, and railway control systems. It has also been used to verify properties of electrical circuits.