Automated generation of hybrid automata for multi-rigid-body mechanical systems and its application to the falsification of safety properties

© 2017 The Authors. Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1080/13873954.2017.1369437What if we designed a tool to automatically generate a dynamical transition system for the formal specification of mechanical systems subject to multiple impacts, contacts and discontinuous friction? Such a tool would represent an advance in the description and simulation of these complex systems. This is precisely what this paper offers: Dyverse Rigid Body Toolbox (DyverseRBT). This tool requires a sufficiently expressive computational model that can accurately describe the behaviour of the system as it evolves over time. For this purpose, we propose an alternative abstraction of multi-rigid-body (MRB) mechanical systems with multiple contacts as an extended version of the classical hybrid automaton, which we call MRB hybrid automaton. One of the chief characteristics of the MRB hybrid automaton is the inclusion of computation nodes to encode algorithms to calculate the contact forces. The computation nodes consist of a set of non-dynamical discrete locations, discrete transitions and guards between these locations, and resets on transitions. They can account for the energy transfer not explicitly considered within the rigid-body formalism. The proposed modelling framework is well suited for the automated verification of dynamical properties of realistic mechanical systems. We show this by the falsification of safety properties over the transition system generated by DyverseRBT.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK: [Grant Number EP/I001689/1] (‘DYVERSE: A New Kind of Control for Hybrid Systems’), and the Research Councils UK (RCUK): [Grant Number EP/E50048/1].Published versio