Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Who can handle Zeno

During the past week's CyPhy workshop Jan learned that there are no general purpose tools for simulation of hybrid systems that correctly handle Zeno points. Zeno points of a hybrid system are those times that have a bounded neighborhood in which the system makes an infinite number of transitions. The state of the art is to employ symbolic heuristics to detect Zeno points, but even mature tools such as OpenModelica can generate erroneous simulations at and following Zeno points. There is thus a need for hybrid simulators that can detect, or at least indicate the presence of Zeno points.