Journal of Information Technology Impact

The use of formal methods, techniques and tools may generally guarantee a systems’ safe operation. Such a process includes system modeling with a mathematical model, which is an approximation of the physical system, and is used to make easier the next step of analysis. Formal analysis of hybrid systems, which involve mixed continuous-valued and discrete dynamics, is concerned with verifying whether a hybrid system satisfies a desired specification, like avoiding an unsafe region of the state space. In this paper, we examine the general impact of hybrid automata on modeling and analyzing hybrid systems and we discuss in particular some advantages that arise when exploiting them in the context of particular methods for verifying the reachability of states in common paradigms that have already being investigated with other classical methods. Finally, we use two case studies concerning different classes of hybrid automata to demonstrate the applicability and the efficiency of exploiting hybrid automata on system modeling and analysis.