Nicolas Markey

Abstract

The development of formal methods for control design is an important challenge with potential applications in a wide range of safety-critical cyber-physical systems. Focusing on switched dynamical systems, we propose a new abstraction, based on time-varying regions of invariance (control funnels), that models behaviors of systems as timed automata. The main advantage of this method is that it allows for the automated verification and reactive controller synthesis without discretizing the evolution of the state of the system. Efficient and analytic constructions are possible in the case of linear dynamics whereas bounding funnels with conjectured properties based on numerical simulations can be used for general nonlinear dynamics. We demonstrate the potential of our approach with three examples.

@article{rts53(3)-BMPS,
  author =              {Bouyer, Patricia and Markey, Nicolas and Perrin,
                         Nicolas and Schlehuber{-}Caissier, Philipp},
  title =               {Timed automata abstraction of switched dynamical
                         systems using control funnels},
  publisher =           {Kluwer Academic},
  journal =             {Real-Time Systems},
  volume =              {53},
  number =              {3},
  pages =               {327-353},
  year =                {2017},
  month =               may,
  doi =                 {10.1007/s11241-016-9262-3},
  abstract =            {The development of formal methods for control design
                         is an important challenge with potential
                         applications in a wide range of safety-critical
                         cyber-physical systems. Focusing on switched
                         dynamical systems, we propose a new abstraction,
                         based on time-varying regions of invariance (control
                         funnels), that models behaviors of systems as timed
                         automata. The~main advantage of this method is that
                         it allows for the automated verification and
                         reactive controller synthesis without discretizing
                         the evolution of the state of the system. Efficient
                         and analytic constructions are possible in the case
                         of linear dynamics whereas bounding funnels with
                         conjectured properties based on numerical
                         simulations can be used for general nonlinear
                         dynamics. We~demonstrate the potential of our
                         approach with three examples.},
}