Safety verification of non-linear hybrid systems is quasi-decidable

Abstrakt

Safety verification of hybrid systems is undecidable, except for very special cases. In this paper, we circumvent undecidability by providing a verification algorithm that provably terminates for all robust problem instances, but need not necessarily terminate for non-robust problem instances. A problem instance x is robust iff the given property holds not only for x itself, but also when x is perturbed a little bit. Since, in practice, well-designed hybrid systems are usually robust, this implies that the algorithm terminates for the cases occurring in practice. In contrast to earlier work, our result holds for a very general class of hybrid systems, and it uses a continuous time model.