Subclass Of Hybrid Automata Research Articles

On complexity reduction of the discrete-event subsystem of Flat Hybrid Automata for control design

Abstract The class of hybrid systems describes most technical systems in great detail. However, the respective models and their behavior tend to be very complex. Recently, a new subclass of hybrid automata has been introduced, the Flat Hybrid Automata (FHA) that relies on the concepts of differential flatness for the continuous parts, and strongly connected automaton graphs for the discrete event part, in order to deal with the complexity from a design perspective. Therefore, we introduce in the present paper an approach to reduce the automaton graph of an FHA in a systematic way by removing edges from the adjacency matrix. The main contribution of the paper is twofold: Firstly, based on practical considerations we develop a heuristic algorithm to reduce the automaton graph. Secondly, we present possible ways to include knowledge about the system in the reduction.

Interrupt Timed Automata: verification and expressiveness

We introduce the class of Interrupt Timed Automata (ITA), a subclass of hybrid automata well suited to the description of timed multi-task systems with interruptions in a single processor environment. While the reachability problem is undecidable for hybrid automata we show that it is decidable for ITA. More precisely we prove that the untimed language of an ITA is regular, by building a finite automaton as a generalized class graph. We then establish that the reachability problem for ITA is in NEXPTIME and in PTIME when the number of clocks is fixed. To prove the first result, we define a subclass ITA- of ITA, and show that (1) any ITA can be reduced to a language-equivalent automaton in ITA- and (2) the reachability problem in this subclass is in NEXPTIME (without any class graph). In the next step, we investigate the verification of real time properties over ITA. We prove that model checking SCL, a fragment of a timed linear time logic, is undecidable. On the other hand, we give model checking procedures for two fragments of timed branching time logic. We also compare the expressive power of classical timed automata and ITA and prove that the corresponding families of accepted languages are incomparable. The result also holds for languages accepted by controlled real-time automata (CRTA), that extend timed automata. We finally combine ITA with CRTA, in a model which encompasses both classes and show that the reachability problem is still decidable. Additionally we show that the languages of ITA are neither closed under complementation nor under intersection.

HYTECH: a model checker for hybrid systems

A hybrid system consists of a collection of digital programs that interact with each other and with an analog environment. Examples of hybrid systems include medical equipment, manufacturing controllers, automotive controllers, and robots. The formal analysis of the mixed digital-analog nature of these systems requires a model that incorporates the discrete behavior of computer programs with the continuous behavior of environment variables, such as temperature and pressure. Hybrid automata capture both types of behavior by combining finite automata with differential inclusions (i.e. differential inequalities). HyTech is a symbolic model checker for linear hybrid automata, an expressive, yet automatically analyzable, subclass of hybrid automata. A key feature of HyTech is its ability to perform parametric analysis, i.e. to determine the values of design parameters for which a linear hybrid automaton satisfies a temporal requirement.