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. 2021 Mar 1;12651:370–388. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-72016-2_20

Automated and Formal Synthesis of Neural Barrier Certificates for Dynamical Models

Andrea Peruffo 10,, Daniele Ahmed 11, Alessandro Abate 10
Editors: Jan Friso Groote8, Kim Guldstrand Larsen9
PMCID: PMC7979189

Abstract

We introduce an automated, formal, counterexample-based approach to synthesise Barrier Certificates (BC) for the safety verification of continuous and hybrid dynamical models. The approach is underpinned by an inductive framework: this is structured as a sequential loop between a learner, which manipulates a candidate BC structured as a neural network, and a sound verifier, which either certifies the candidate’s validity or generates counter-examples to further guide the learner. We compare the approach against state-of-the-art techniques, over polynomial and non-polynomial dynamical models: the outcomes show that we can synthesise sound BCs up to two orders of magnitude faster, with in particular a stark speedup on the verification engine (up to three orders less), whilst needing a far smaller data set (up to three orders less) for the learning part. Beyond improvements over the state of the art, we further challenge the new approach on a hybrid dynamical model and on larger-dimensional models, and showcase the numerical robustness of our algorithms and codebase.

Contributor Information

Jan Friso Groote, Email: j.f.groote@tue.nl.

Kim Guldstrand Larsen, Email: kgl@cs.aau.dk.

Andrea Peruffo, Email: andrea.peruffo@cs.ox.ac.uk.

Alessandro Abate, Email: alessandro.abate@cs.ox.ac.uk.

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