PRoTECT: Parallelized Construction of Safety Barrier Certificates for Nonlinear Polynomial Systems

Abstract

We develop an open-source software tool, called PRoTECT, for the parallelized construction of safety barrier certificates (BCs) for nonlinear polynomial systems. This tool employs sum-of-squares (SOS) optimization programs to systematically search for polynomial-type BCs, while aiming to verify safety properties over four classes of dynamical systems: (i) discrete-time stochastic systems, (ii) discrete-time deterministic systems, (iii) continuous-time stochastic systems, and (iv) continuous-time deterministic systems. PRoTECT is implemented in Python as an application programming interface (API), offering users the flexibility to interact either through its user-friendly graphic user interface (GUI) or via function calls from other Python programs. PRoTECT leverages parallelism across different barrier degrees to efficiently search for a feasible BC.