Integrated Design of Symbolic Controllers for Nonlinear Systems

Symbolic models of continuous and hybrid systems have been studied for a long time, because they provide a formal approach to solve control problems where software and hardware interact with the physical world. While being powerful, this approach often encounters some limitations in concrete applications, because of the large size of the symbolic models needed to be constructed. Inspired by on-the-fly techniques for verification and control of finite state machines, in this note we propose an algorithm that integrates the construction of the symbolic models with the design of the symbolic controllers. Computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is discussed and an illustrative example is included.