Formal Modeling and Analysis for Interactive Hybrid Systems

Ellen J. Bass (Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia), Karen M. Feigh (School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology), Elsa Gunter (Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), and John Rushby

4th International Workshop on Formal Methods for Interactive Systems: FMIS 2011, Limerick, Ireland, 21 June 2011

Abstract

An effective strategy for discovering certain kinds of automation surprise and other problems in interactive systems is to build models of the participating (automated and human) agents and then explore all reachable states of the composed system looking for divergences between mental states and those of the automation. Various kinds of model checking provide ways to automate this approach when the agents can be modeled as discrete automata. But when some of the agents are continuous dynamical systems (e.g., airplanes), the composed model is a hybrid (i.e., mixed continuous and discrete) system and these are notoriously hard to analyze.

We describe an approach for very abstract modeling of hybrid systems using relational approximations and their automated analysis using infinite bounded model checking supported by an SMT solver. When counterexamples are found, we describe how additional constraints can be supplied to direct counterexamples toward plausible scenarios that can be confirmed in high-fidelity simulation. The approach is illustrated though application to a known (and now corrected) human-automation interaction problem in Airbus aircraft.

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BibTeX Entry

@INPROCEEDINGS{Bass-etal:FMIS11,
	AUTHOR = {Ellen J. Bass and Karen M. Feigh and Elsa Gunter
		and John Rushby},
	TITLE = {Formal Modeling and Analysis for Interactive Hybrid Systems},
	BOOKTITLE = {Fourth International Workshop on Formal Methods for
		Interactive Systems: {FMIS 2011}},
	publisher = {},
	SERIES = {Electronic Communications of the EASST},
	VOLUME = 45,
	YEAR = 2011,
	ADDRESS = {Limerick, Ireland},
	MONTH = jun
}

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