Tropical Fourier-Motzkin elimination, with an application to real-time verification

We introduce a generalization of tropical polyhedra able to express both strict and non-strict inequalities. Such inequalities are handled by means of a semiring of germs (encoding infinitesimal perturbations). We develop a tropical analogue of Fourier-Motzkin elimination from which we derive geometrical properties of these polyhedra. In particular, we show that they coincide with the tropically convex union of (non-necessarily closed) cells that are convex both classically and tropically. We also prove that the redundant inequalities produced when performing successive elimination steps can be dynamically deleted by reduction to mean payoff game problems. As a complement, we provide a coarser (polynomial time) deletion procedure which is enough to arrive at a simply exponential bound for the total execution time. These algorithms are illustrated by an application to real-time systems (reachability analysis of timed automata).Comment: 29 pages, 8 figure

An exact general remeshing scheme applied to physically conservative voxelization

We present an exact general remeshing scheme to compute analytic integrals of polynomial functions over the intersections between convex polyhedral cells of old and new meshes. In physics applications this allows one to ensure global mass, momentum, and energy conservation while applying higher-order polynomial interpolation. We elaborate on applications of our algorithm arising in the analysis of cosmological N-body data, computer graphics, and continuum mechanics problems. We focus on the particular case of remeshing tetrahedral cells onto a Cartesian grid such that the volume integral of the polynomial density function given on the input mesh is guaranteed to equal the corresponding integral over the output mesh. We refer to this as "physically conservative voxelization". At the core of our method is an algorithm for intersecting two convex polyhedra by successively clipping one against the faces of the other. This algorithm is an implementation of the ideas presented abstractly by Sugihara (1994), who suggests using the planar graph representations of convex polyhedra to ensure topological consistency of the output. This makes our implementation robust to geometric degeneracy in the input. We employ a simplicial decomposition to calculate moment integrals up to quadratic order over the resulting intersection domain. We also address practical issues arising in a software implementation, including numerical stability in geometric calculations, management of cancellation errors, and extension to two dimensions. In a comparison to recent work, we show substantial performance gains. We provide a C implementation intended to be a fast, accurate, and robust tool for geometric calculations on polyhedral mesh elements.Comment: Code implementation available at https://github.com/devonmpowell/r3

The Parma Polyhedra Library: Toward a Complete Set of Numerical Abstractions for the Analysis and Verification of Hardware and Software Systems

Since its inception as a student project in 2001, initially just for the handling (as the name implies) of convex polyhedra, the Parma Polyhedra Library has been continuously improved and extended by joining scrupulous research on the theoretical foundations of (possibly non-convex) numerical abstractions to a total adherence to the best available practices in software development. Even though it is still not fully mature and functionally complete, the Parma Polyhedra Library already offers a combination of functionality, reliability, usability and performance that is not matched by similar, freely available libraries. In this paper, we present the main features of the current version of the library, emphasizing those that distinguish it from other similar libraries and those that are important for applications in the field of analysis and verification of hardware and software systems.Comment: 38 pages, 2 figures, 3 listings, 3 table

Reachability analysis for timed automata using max-plus algebra

International audienceWe show that max-plus polyhedra are usable as a data structure in reachability analysis of timed automata. Drawing inspiration from the extensive work that has been done on difference bound matrices, as well as previous work on max-plus polyhedra in other areas, we develop the algorithms needed to perform forward and backward reachability analysis using max-plus polyhedra. To show that the approach works in practice and theory alike, we have created a proof-of-concept implementation on top of the model checker opaal

Reducing Clocks in Timed Automata while Preserving Bisimulation

Model checking timed automata becomes increasingly complex with the increase in the number of clocks. Hence it is desirable that one constructs an automaton with the minimum number of clocks possible. The problem of checking whether there exists a timed automaton with a smaller number of clocks such that the timed language accepted by the original automaton is preserved is known to be undecidable. In this paper, we give a construction, which for any given timed automaton produces a timed bisimilar automaton with the least number of clocks. Further, we show that such an automaton with the minimum possible number of clocks can be constructed in time that is doubly exponential in the number of clocks of the original automaton.Comment: 28 pages including reference, 8 figures, full version of paper accepted in CONCUR 201

The tropical double description method

We develop a tropical analogue of the classical double description method allowing one to compute an internal representation (in terms of vertices) of a polyhedron defined externally (by inequalities). The heart of the tropical algorithm is a characterization of the extreme points of a polyhedron in terms of a system of constraints which define it. We show that checking the extremality of a point reduces to checking whether there is only one minimal strongly connected component in an hypergraph. The latter problem can be solved in almost linear time, which allows us to eliminate quickly redundant generators. We report extensive tests (including benchmarks from an application to static analysis) showing that the method outperforms experimentally the previous ones by orders of magnitude. The present tools also lead to worst case bounds which improve the ones provided by previous methods.Comment: 12 pages, prepared for the Proceedings of the Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, 2010, Nancy, Franc

LTL Parameter Synthesis of Parametric Timed Automata

The parameter synthesis problem for parametric timed automata is undecidable in general even for very simple reachability properties. In this paper we introduce restrictions on parameter valuations under which the parameter synthesis problem is decidable for LTL properties. The investigated bounded integer parameter synthesis problem could be solved using an explicit enumeration of all possible parameter valuations. We propose an alternative symbolic zone-based method for this problem which results in a faster computation. Our technique extends the ideas of the automata-based approach to LTL model checking of timed automata. To justify the usefulness of our approach, we provide experimental evaluation and compare our method with explicit enumeration technique.Comment: 23 pages, extended versio

Parametric Schedulability Analysis of Fixed Priority Real-Time Distributed Systems

Parametric analysis is a powerful tool for designing modern embedded systems, because it permits to explore the space of design parameters, and to check the robustness of the system with respect to variations of some uncontrollable variable. In this paper, we address the problem of parametric schedulability analysis of distributed real-time systems scheduled by fixed priority. In particular, we propose two different approaches to parametric analysis: the first one is a novel technique based on classical schedulability analysis, whereas the second approach is based on model checking of Parametric Timed Automata (PTA). The proposed analytic method extends existing sensitivity analysis for single processors to the case of a distributed system, supporting preemptive and non-preemptive scheduling, jitters and unconstrained deadlines. Parametric Timed Automata are used to model all possible behaviours of a distributed system, and therefore it is a necessary and sufficient analysis. Both techniques have been implemented in two software tools, and they have been compared with classical holistic analysis on two meaningful test cases. The results show that the analytic method provides results similar to classical holistic analysis in a very efficient way, whereas the PTA approach is slower but covers the entire space of solutions.Comment: Submitted to ECRTS 2013 (http://ecrts.eit.uni-kl.de/ecrts13