Safety Verification of Hybrid Systems Using Barrier Certificates

This paper presents a novel methodology for safety verification of hybrid systems. For proving that all trajectories of a hybrid system do not enter an unsafe region, the proposed method uses a function of state termed a barrier certificate. The zero level set of a barrier certificate separates the unsafe region from all possible trajectories starting from a given set of initial conditions, hence providing an exact proof of system safety. No explicit computation of reachable sets is required in the construction of barrier certificates, which makes nonlinearity, uncertainty, and constraints can be handled directly within this framework. The method is also computationally tractable, since barrier certificates can be constructed using the sum of squares decomposition and semidefinite programming. Some examples are provided to illustrate the use of the method.