AN APPROACH TO REASONING ABOUT HYBRID SYSTEMS

A formal approach is presented for proving temporal properties of dynamic systems. Its main advantage is that it can be used to prove properties of hybrid systems, i.e. those whose state contains both discrete and continuous parameters. In contrast, most current temporal reasoning techniques are restricted either to purely discrete systems or to purely continuous systems. Our approach is based upon a new modeling technique called DMOD. A DMOD model of a system defines the causality relation between events in the system, using definite clauses, i.e. logic programs. Thereby, the problem of reasoning about hybrid systems is reduced to one of reasoning about the behavior of definite clauses. As these possess a simple proof theory, reasoning is substantially simplified.