From Zonotopes to Proof Certificates: A Formal Pipeline for Safe Control Envelopes

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hellwig, Jonathan, Schäfer, Lukas, Qian, Long, Platzer, André, Althoff, Matthias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hellwig, Jonathan
Schäfer, Lukas
Qian, Long
Platzer, André
Althoff, Matthias
author_facet Hellwig, Jonathan
Schäfer, Lukas
Qian, Long
Platzer, André
Althoff, Matthias
contents Synthesizing controllers that enforce both safety and actuator constraints is a central challenge in the design of cyber-physical systems. State-of-the-art reachability methods based on zonotopes deliver impressive scalability, yet no zonotope reachability tool has been formally verified and the lack of end-to-end correctness undermines the confidence in their use for safety-critical systems. Although deductive verification with the hybrid system prover KeYmaera X could, in principle, resolve this assurance gap, the high-dimensional set representations required for realistic control envelopes overwhelm its reasoning based on quantifier elimination. To address this gap, we formalize how control-invariant sets serve as sound safety certificates. Building on that foundation, we develop a verification pipeline for control envelopes that unites scalability and formal rigor. First, we compute control envelopes with high-performance reachability algorithms. Second, we certify every intermediate result using provably correct logical principles. To accelerate this certification, we offload computationally intensive zonotope containment tasks to efficient numerical backends, which return compact witnesses that KeYmaera X validates rapidly. We show the practical utility of our approach through representative case studies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_20301
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Zonotopes to Proof Certificates: A Formal Pipeline for Safe Control Envelopes
Hellwig, Jonathan
Schäfer, Lukas
Qian, Long
Platzer, André
Althoff, Matthias
Logic in Computer Science
F.3.1; F.4.1; D.2.4; G.1.7
Synthesizing controllers that enforce both safety and actuator constraints is a central challenge in the design of cyber-physical systems. State-of-the-art reachability methods based on zonotopes deliver impressive scalability, yet no zonotope reachability tool has been formally verified and the lack of end-to-end correctness undermines the confidence in their use for safety-critical systems. Although deductive verification with the hybrid system prover KeYmaera X could, in principle, resolve this assurance gap, the high-dimensional set representations required for realistic control envelopes overwhelm its reasoning based on quantifier elimination. To address this gap, we formalize how control-invariant sets serve as sound safety certificates. Building on that foundation, we develop a verification pipeline for control envelopes that unites scalability and formal rigor. First, we compute control envelopes with high-performance reachability algorithms. Second, we certify every intermediate result using provably correct logical principles. To accelerate this certification, we offload computationally intensive zonotope containment tasks to efficient numerical backends, which return compact witnesses that KeYmaera X validates rapidly. We show the practical utility of our approach through representative case studies.
title From Zonotopes to Proof Certificates: A Formal Pipeline for Safe Control Envelopes
topic Logic in Computer Science
F.3.1; F.4.1; D.2.4; G.1.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20301