A Unifying Perspective for Safety of Stochastic Systems: From Barrier Functions to Finite Abstractions

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Laurenti, Luca; Lahijanian, Morteza
• 署名单位: Delft University of Technology; University of Colorado System; University of Colorado Boulder
• 刊物名称: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0018-9286
• DOI: 10.1109/TAC.2025.3597569
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: verification

摘要

Providing safety guarantees for stochastic dynamical systems is a central problem in various fields, including control theory, machine learning, and robotics. Existing methods either employ stochastic barrier functions (SBFs) or rely on numerical approaches based on finite abstractions. SBFs, analogous to Lyapunov functions, are used to establish (probabilistic) set invariance, whereas abstraction-based approaches approximate the stochastic system with a finite model to compute safety probability bounds. This article presents a unifying perspective on these seemingly different approaches. Specifically, we show that both methods can be interpreted as approximations of a stochastic dynamic programming problem. This perspective allows us to formally establish the correctness of both techniques, characterize their convergence and optimality properties, and analyze their respective assumptions, advantages, and limitations. Our analysis reveals that, unlike SBFs-based methods, abstraction-based approaches can provide asymptotically optimal safety certificates, albeit at the cost of increased computational effort.