A Formal Mathematical Framework for Modeling Probabilistic Hybrid Systems.
Robert St‐Aubin, Joel I. Friedman, Alan K. Mackworth · 2006
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. 1