BMC 2004 Preliminary Version Verifying Industrial Hybrid Systems

Industrial systems of practical relevance can be often characterized in terms of discrete control variables and real-valued physical variables, and can therefore be modeled as hybrid automata. Unfortunately, continuity of the physical behaviour over time, or triangular constraints, must often be assumed, which yield an undecidable class of hybrid automata. In this paper, we propose a technique for bounded reachability of linear hybrid automata, based on the reduction of a bounded reachability problem to a MathSAT problem, i.e. satisfiability of a boolean combination of propositional variables and mathematical constraints. The MathSAT solver can be used to check the existence (or absence) of paths of bounded length. The approach is very similar in spirit to SAT-based bounded model checking; furthermore, the ability to reason directly about real variables gives computational leverage over discretization-based methods. Despite the undecidability of the general problem, the proposed method is able to provide valuable information on large designs of practical relevance