Safe & Robust Reachability Analysis of Hybrid Systems

Abstract: Hybrid systems - more precisely, their mathematical models - can exhibit behaviors, like Zeno behaviors, that are absent in purely discrete or purely continuous systems. First, we observe that, in this context, the usual definition of reachability - namely, the reflexive and transitive closure of a transition relation - can be unsafe, ie, it may compute a proper subset of the set of states reachable in finite time from a set of initial states. Therefore, we propose safe reachability, which always computes a superset of the set of reachable states. Second, in safety analysis of hybrid and continuous systems, it is important to ensure that a reachability analysis is also robust wrt small perturbations to the set of initial states and to the system itself, since discrepancies between a system and its mathematical models are unavoidable. We show that, under certain conditions, the best Scott continuous approximation of an analysis A is also its best robust approximation. Finally, we exemplify the gap between the set of reachable states and the supersets computed by safe reachability and its best robust approximation.