International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science c World Scientific Publishing Company ABSTRACTION AND COUNTEREXAMPLE-GUIDED REFINEMENT IN MODEL CHECKING OF HYBRID SYSTEMS

Communicated by Editor’s name Hybrid dynamic systems include both continuous and discrete state variables. Properties of hy-brid systems, which have an infinite state space, can often be verified using ordinary model checking together with a finite-state abstraction. Model checking can be inconclusive, however, in which case the abstraction must be refined. This paper presents a new procedure to perform this refinement op-eration for abstractions of hybrid systems. Following an approach originally developed for finite-state systems [11, 25], the refinement procedure constructs a new abstraction that eliminates a counterexam-ple generated by the model checker. For hybrid systems, analysis of the counterexample requires the computation of sets of reachable states in the continuous state space. We show how such reachability computations with varying degrees of complexity can be used to refine hybrid system abstractions ef-ficiently. Examples illustrate our counterexample-guided refinement procedure. Experimental results for a prototype implementation indicate significant advantages over existing methods