Computability of the Behaviour of Impacting Systems Beyond Zeno Times

Abstract

Mathematical models of hybrid systems may exhibit Zeno behaviour, in which infinitely many discrete events occur in a finite time interval. Although this may be considered physically unrealistic, since Zeno behaviour is useful in modelling real-world systems, it is important for computational tools to be able to handle it. In particular, verification tools should use a well-defined semantics under which the Zeno behaviour is effectively and rigorously computable. In this paper, we give a semantics for systems with events similar to mechanical impacts and show that computation of the behaviour is possible, even beyond the Zeno time. If we allow perturbations outside this class of impacting systems, then it may not be possible to handle Zeno behaviour in a realistic way.