Formal verification of hybrid systems using CheckMate: a case study

We present a formal verification of a control algorithm from the literature for a four-cylinder four-stroke engine in the cutoff mode. The controlled system is modeled, simulated and verified using CheckMate, a tool for formal verification of hybrid systems developed at Carnegie Mellon University. CheckMate automatically constructs a polyhedral-invariant hybrid automaton (PIHA) from a Matlab/Simulink model of the hybrid system and performs the verification using discrete model approximations. This case study illustrates how verification can be performed directly on a model of the hybrid system dynamics without first constructing an approximation to the continuous dynamics using timed automata or linear hybrid automata models.