Safety Verification of Floodgate Operation Protocols Using Hybrid Automata

Flooding is one of the most damaging of natural disasters. Structural approaches to flood management consist of reservoirs and dams equipped with floodgates, along with protocols for their operation. However, in spite of the infrastructure being in place, floods can occur because of flaws in the floodgate operation protocols or human error in its implementation. Hybrid automata are a formalism for modeling systems that have discrete as well as continuous components. In some cases it is possible to efficiently decide whether such systems satisfy precisely defined safety criteria. We model a class of flood management systems as hybrid automata and use existing verification techniques to prove safety of floodgate operation protocols. This approach yields a tool for evaluating such protocols. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of formal methods in computer science to the problem of flood management.