Safety Guarantees for Hybrid Systems

Hybrid systems describe processes that typically need to satisfy a set of strict physical, computation, and communication constraints. Mission-critical and time-critical cyber-physical systems are a prime example where these constraints play a key role in analysis, controller synthesis, and implementation. On top of classical notions such as stability, safety plays a major role in the control design of hybrid systems. There is a long history of methods related to the safety analysis and safety enforcement for dynamical systems, with the ones concerning linear systems being more mature than the others. Due to the importance and complexity of the underlying problem, several different techniques have been developed for hybrid systems. This entry summarizes the most important approaches and tools, together with references for further reading