Elementary hybrid systems (EHSs) are those hybrid systems (HSs) containing
elementary functions such as exp, ln, sin, cos, etc. EHSs are very common in
practice, especially in safety-critical domains. Due to the non-polynomial
expressions which lead to undecidable arithmetic, verification of EHSs is very
hard. Existing approaches based on partition of state space or
over-approximation of reachable sets suffer from state explosion or inflation
of numerical errors. In this paper, we propose a symbolic abstraction approach
that reduces EHSs to polynomial hybrid systems (PHSs), by replacing all
non-polynomial terms with newly introduced variables. Thus the verification of
EHSs is reduced to the one of PHSs, enabling us to apply all the
well-established verification techniques and tools for PHSs to EHSs. In this
way, it is possible to avoid the limitations of many existing methods. We
illustrate the abstraction approach and its application in safety verification
of EHSs by several real world examples
