Combining a computer science and control theory approach to the verification of hybrid systems

We report on the project "Specification and Verification of Discrete Controllers for Continuous Systems Based on Modular Models and Compositional Analysis". Within this project we aim at developing an automatic verification tool for discrete controllers of technical systems which can be applied to systems of industrial size. To reach this objective we combine two different approaches being used in control theory and computer science. These are the timed condition/event systems (TCESs) (Kowalewski et al., 1997) and the timed automata (TAs) (Alur and Dill, 1994) formalisms. The state of the project is such that, because of the equivalence of TCESs and TAs we have shown in (Kowalewski et al., 1997) that it is possible to automatically analyze real-time systems modeled by TCESs with analysis tools developed for TAs. We describe in detail the motivation, goal and state of our project, and illustrate the equivalence of TCESs and TAs.