Weak Singular Hybrid Automata

Abstract

The framework of Hybrid automata—introduced by Alur, Courcourbetis, Henzinger, and Ho—provides a formal modeling and analysis environment to analyze the interaction between the discrete and the continuous parts of hybrid systems. Hybrid automata can be considered as generalizations of finite state automata augmented with a finite set of real-valued variables whose dynamics in each state is governed by a system of ordinary differential equations. Moreover, the discrete transitions of hybrid automata are guarded by constraints over the values of these real-valued variables, and enable discontinuous jumps in the evolution of these variables. Singular hybrid automata are a subclass of hybrid automata where dynamics is specified by state-dependent constant vectors. Henzinger, Kopke, Puri, and Varaiya showed that for even very restricted subclasses of singular hybrid automata, the fundamental verification questions, like reachability and schedulability, are undecidable. Recently, Alur, Wojtczak, and Trivedi studied an interesting class of hybrid systems, called constant-rate multi-mode systems, where schedulability and reachability analysis can be performed in polynomial time. Inspired by the definition of constant-rate multi-mode systems, in this paper we introduce weak singular hybrid automata (WSHA), a previously unexplored subclass of singular hybrid automata, and show the decidability (and the exact complexity) of various verification questions for this class including reachability (NP-Complete) and LTL model-checking (Pspace-Complete). We further show that extending WSHA with a single unrestricted clock or with unrestricted variable updates lead to undecidability of reachability problem.

This work was partly supported by the DST-CNRS project AVeRTS.