Automatic rectangular refinement of affine hybrid systems

We show how to automatically construct and refine rectangular abstractions of systems of linear differential equations. From a hybrid automaton whose dynamics are given by a system of linear differential equations, our method computes automatically a sequence of rectangular hybrid automata that are increasingly precise overapproximations of the original hybrid automaton. We prove an optimality criterion for successive refinements. We also show that this method can take into account a safety property to be verified, refining only relevant parts of the state space. The practicability of the method is illustrated on a benchmark case study.