Efficient Shield Synthesis via State-Space Transformation
Abstract
We consider the problem of synthesizing safety strategies for control systems, also known as shields. Since the state space is infinite, shields are typically computed over a finite-state abstraction, with the most common abstraction being a rectangular grid. However, for many systems, such a grid does not align well with the safety property or the system dynamics. That is why a coarse grid is rarely sufficient, but a fine grid is typically computationally infeasible to obtain. In this paper, we show that appropriate state-space transformations can still allow to use a coarse grid at almost no computational overhead. We demonstrate in three case studies that our transformation-based synthesis outperforms a standard synthesis by several orders of magnitude. In the first two case studies, we use domain knowledge to select a suitable transformation. In the third case study, we instead report on results in engineering a transformation without domain knowledge.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2407.19911,
title = {Efficient Shield Synthesis via State-Space Transformation},
author = {Asger Horn Brorholt and Andreas Holck Høeg-Petersen and Kim Guldstrand Larsen and Christian Schilling},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.19911},
year = {2025}
}