167 research outputs found
Symbolic Models for Stochastic Switched Systems: A Discretization and a Discretization-Free Approach
Stochastic switched systems are a relevant class of stochastic hybrid systems
with probabilistic evolution over a continuous domain and control-dependent
discrete dynamics over a finite set of modes. In the past few years several
different techniques have been developed to assist in the stability analysis of
stochastic switched systems. However, more complex and challenging objectives
related to the verification of and the controller synthesis for logic
specifications have not been formally investigated for this class of systems as
of yet. With logic specifications we mean properties expressed as formulae in
linear temporal logic or as automata on infinite strings. This paper addresses
these complex objectives by constructively deriving approximately equivalent
(bisimilar) symbolic models of stochastic switched systems. More precisely,
this paper provides two different symbolic abstraction techniques: one requires
state space discretization, but the other one does not require any space
discretization which can be potentially more efficient than the first one when
dealing with higher dimensional stochastic switched systems. Both techniques
provide finite symbolic models that are approximately bisimilar to stochastic
switched systems under some stability assumptions on the concrete model. This
allows formally synthesizing controllers (switching signals) that are valid for
the concrete system over the finite symbolic model, by means of mature
automata-theoretic techniques in the literature. The effectiveness of the
results are illustrated by synthesizing switching signals enforcing logic
specifications for two case studies including temperature control of a six-room
building.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1302.386
Towards Scalable Synthesis of Stochastic Control Systems
Formal control synthesis approaches over stochastic systems have received
significant attention in the past few years, in view of their ability to
provide provably correct controllers for complex logical specifications in an
automated fashion. Examples of complex specifications of interest include
properties expressed as formulae in linear temporal logic (LTL) or as automata
on infinite strings. A general methodology to synthesize controllers for such
properties resorts to symbolic abstractions of the given stochastic systems.
Symbolic models are discrete abstractions of the given concrete systems with
the property that a controller designed on the abstraction can be refined (or
implemented) into a controller on the original system. Although the recent
development of techniques for the construction of symbolic models has been
quite encouraging, the general goal of formal synthesis over stochastic control
systems is by no means solved. A fundamental issue with the existing techniques
is the known "curse of dimensionality," which is due to the need to discretize
state and input sets and that results in an exponential complexity over the
number of state and input variables in the concrete system. In this work we
propose a novel abstraction technique for incrementally stable stochastic
control systems, which does not require state-space discretization but only
input set discretization, and that can be potentially more efficient (and thus
scalable) than existing approaches. We elucidate the effectiveness of the
proposed approach by synthesizing a schedule for the coordination of two
traffic lights under some safety and fairness requirements for a road traffic
model. Further we argue that this 5-dimensional linear stochastic control
system cannot be studied with existing approaches based on state-space
discretization due to the very large number of generated discrete states.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:1407.273
Backstepping controller synthesis and characterizations of incremental stability
Incremental stability is a property of dynamical and control systems,
requiring the uniform asymptotic stability of every trajectory, rather than
that of an equilibrium point or a particular time-varying trajectory. Similarly
to stability, Lyapunov functions and contraction metrics play important roles
in the study of incremental stability. In this paper, we provide
characterizations and descriptions of incremental stability in terms of
existence of coordinate-invariant notions of incremental Lyapunov functions and
contraction metrics, respectively. Most design techniques providing controllers
rendering control systems incrementally stable have two main drawbacks: they
can only be applied to control systems in either parametric-strict-feedback or
strict-feedback form, and they require these control systems to be smooth. In
this paper, we propose a design technique that is applicable to larger classes
of (not necessarily smooth) control systems. Moreover, we propose a recursive
way of constructing contraction metrics (for smooth control systems) and
incremental Lyapunov functions which have been identified as a key tool
enabling the construction of finite abstractions of nonlinear control systems,
the approximation of stochastic hybrid systems, source-code model checking for
nonlinear dynamical systems and so on. The effectiveness of the proposed
results in this paper is illustrated by synthesizing a controller rendering a
non-smooth control system incrementally stable as well as constructing its
finite abstraction, using the computed incremental Lyapunov function.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure
Compositional abstraction and safety synthesis using overlapping symbolic models
In this paper, we develop a compositional approach to abstraction and safety
synthesis for a general class of discrete time nonlinear systems. Our approach
makes it possible to define a symbolic abstraction by composing a set of
symbolic subsystems that are overlapping in the sense that they can share some
common state variables. We develop compositional safety synthesis techniques
using such overlapping symbolic subsystems. Comparisons, in terms of
conservativeness and of computational complexity, between abstractions and
controllers obtained from different system decompositions are provided.
Numerical experiments show that the proposed approach for symbolic control
synthesis enables a significant complexity reduction with respect to the
centralized approach, while reducing the conservatism with respect to
compositional approaches using non-overlapping subsystems
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