Formal Simulation and Visualisation of Hybrid Programs

Abstract

The design and analysis of systems that combine computational behaviour with physical processes' continuous dynamics - such as movement, velocity, and voltage - is a famous, challenging task. Several theoretical results from programming theory emerged in the last decades to tackle the issue; some of which are the basis of a proof-of-concept tool, called Lince, that aids in the analysis of such systems, by presenting simulations of their respective behaviours. However being a proof-of-concept, the tool is quite limited with respect to usability, and when attempting to apply it to a set of common, concrete problems, involving autonomous driving and others, it either simply cannot simulate them or fails to provide a satisfactory user-experience. The current work complements the aforementioned theoretical approaches with a more practical perspective, by improving Lince along several dimensions: to name a few, richer syntactic constructs, more operations, more informative plotting systems and errors messages, and a better performance overall. We illustrate our improvements via a variety of examples that involve both autonomous driving and electrical systems.