Path-Oriented Reachability Verification of a Class of Nonlinear Hybrid Automata Using Convex Programming

Hybrid automata are well-studied formal models for dynamical systems. However, the analysis of hybrid automata is extremely difficult, and even state-of-the-art tools can only analyze systems with few continuous variables and simple dynamics. Because the reachability problem for general hybrid automata is undecidable, we give a path-oriented reachability analysis procedure for a class of nonlinear hybrid automata called convex hybrid automata. Our approach encodes the reachability problem along a path of a convex hybrid automaton as a convex feasibility problem, which can be efficiently solved by off-the-shelf convex solvers, such as CVX. Our path-oriented reachability verification approach can be applied in the frameworks of bounded model checking and counterexample-guided abstraction refinement with the goal of achieving significant performance improvement for this subclass of hybrid automata.