A method for invariant generation for polynomial continuous systems

Abstract

This paper presents a method for generating semi-algebraic invariants for systems governed by non-linear polynomial ordinary differential equations under semi-algebraic evolution constraints. Based on the notion of discrete abstraction, our method eliminates unsoundness and unnecessary coarseness found in existing approaches for computing abstractions for non-linear continuous systems and is able to construct invariants with intricate boolean structure, in contrast to invariants typically generated using template-based methods. In order to tackle the state explosion problem associated with discrete abstraction, we present invariant generation algorithms that exploit sound proof rules for safety verification, such as differential cut (DC), and a new proof rule that we call differential divide-and-conquer (DDC), which splits the verification problem into smaller sub-problems. The resulting invariant generation method is observed to be much more scalable and efficient than the naïve approach, exhibiting orders of magnitude performance improvement on many of the problems.