LNCS

We address the problem of analyzing the reachable set of a polynomial nonlinear continuous system by over-approximating the flowpipe of its dynamics. The common approach to tackle this problem is to perform a numerical integration over a given time horizon based on Taylor expansion and interval arithmetic. However, this method results to be very conservative when there is a large difference in speed between trajectories as time progresses. In this paper, we propose to use combinations of barrier functions, which we call piecewise barrier tube (PBT), to over-approximate flowpipe. The basic idea of PBT is that for each segment of a flowpipe, a coarse box which is big enough to contain the segment is constructed using sampled simulation and then in the box we compute by linear programming a set of barrier functions (called barrier tube or BT for short) which work together to form a tube surrounding the flowpipe. The benefit of using PBT is that (1) BT is independent of time and hence can avoid being stretched and deformed by time; and (2) a small number of BTs can form a tight over-approximation for the flowpipe, which means that the computation required to decide whether the BTs intersect the unsafe set can be reduced significantly. We implemented a prototype called PBTS in C++. Experiments on some benchmark systems show that our approach is effective

ARCH-COMP19 Category Report: Continuous and hybrid systems with nonlinear dynamics

We present the results of a friendly competition for formal verification of continuous and hybrid systems with nonlinear continuous dynamics. The friendly competition took place as part of the workshop Applied Verification for Continuous and Hybrid Systems (ARCH) in 2019. In this year, 6 tools Ariadne, CORA, DynIbex, Flow*, Isabelle/HOL, and JuliaReach (in alphabetic order) participated. They are applied to solve reachability analysis problems on four benchmark problems, one of them with hybrid dynamics. We do not rank the tools based on the results, but show the current status and discover the potential advantages of different tools

Interval-based simulation of Zélus IVPs using DynIbex

Modeling continuous-time dynamical systems is a complex task. Fortunately some dedicated programming languages exist to ease this work. Zélus is one such language that generates a simulation executable which can be used to study the behavior of the modeled system. However, such simulations cannot handle uncertainties on some parameters of the system. This makes it necessary to run multiple simulations to check that the system fulfills particular requirements (safety for instance) for all the values in the uncertainty ranges. Interval-based guaranteed integration methods provide a solution to this problem. The DynIbex library provides such methods but it requires a manual encoding of the system in a general purpose programming language (C++). This article presents an extension of the Zélus compiler to generate interval-based guaranteed simulations of IVPs using DynIbex. This extension is conservative since it does not break the existing compilation workflow