STORMED Hybrid Systems

We introduce STORMED hybrid systems, a decidable class of hybrid systems which is similar to o-minimal hybrid automata in that the continuous dynamics and constraints are described in an o-minimal theory. However, unlike o-minimal hybrid automata, the variables are not initialized in a memoryless fashion at discrete steps. STORMED hybrid systems require flows which are monotonic with respect to some vector in the continuous space and can be characterised as bounded-horizon systems in terms of their discrete transitions. We demonstrate that such systems admit a finite bisimulation, which can be effectively constructed provided the o-minimal theory used to describe the system is decidable. As a consequence, many verification problems for such systems have effective decision algorithms.