Timed-Automata Abstraction of Switched Dynamical Systems Using Control Funnels

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 (the control funnels), that models behaviors of systems as timed automata. The main advantage of this method is that it allows automated verification of formal specifications and reactive controller synthesis without discretizing the evolution of the state of the system. Efficient constructions are possible in the case of linear dynamics. We demonstrate the potential of our approach with two examples.