Formal modeling and analysis of interacting hybrid systems in HI-Maude: What happened at the 2010 Sauna World Championships?

Abstract

In this paper we use HI-Maude to model and analyze the human thermoregulatory system and the effect of extreme heat exposure to the human body. The case study is motivated by the 2010 Sauna World Championships, which ended in a tragedy when the last two finalists were severely burnt in surprisingly short time (one of them died the next day). HI-Maude is a rewriting-logic-based formal modeling language and analysis tool for complex hybrid systems whose components influence each others' continuous dynamics. One distinguishing feature of HI-Maude is that the user only needs to describe the continuous dynamics of single components and interactions, instead of having to explicitly define the continuous dynamics of the entire system. HI-Maude analyses are based on numerical approximations of the system's continuous behaviors. We use HI-Maude to analyze how long the human body can survive when experiencing extreme conditions such as those encountered in the Sauna World Championships.