A Formal Mathematical Framework for Modeling Probabilistic Hybrid Systems

ID
TR-2005-24
Authors
Robert St-Aubin and Alan K. Mackworth
Publishing date
October 12, 2005
Length
22 pages
Abstract
The development of autonomous agents, such as mobile robots and software agents, has generated considerable research in recent years. Robotic systems, which are usually built from a mixture of continuous (analog) and discrete (digital) components, are often referred to as hybrid dynamical systems. Traditional approaches to real-time hybrid systems usually define behaviors purely in terms of determinism or sometimes non-determinism. However, this is insufficient as real-time dynamical systems very often exhibit uncertain behaviour. To address this issue, we develop a semantic model, Probabilistic Constraint Nets (PCN), for probabilistic hybrid systems. PCN captures the most general structure of dynamic systems, allowing systems with discrete and continuous time/variables, synchronous as well as asynchronous event structures and uncertain dynamics to be modeled in a unitary framework. Based on a formal mathematical paradigm uniting abstract algebra, topology and measure theory, PCN provides a rigorous formal programming semantics for the design of hybrid real-time embedded systems exhibiting uncertainty.