Influential paper receives HSCC Test-of-Time Award

A paper co-authored by Professor Alessandro Abate has been awarded the Test-of-Time Award at this year’s Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC) conference. The award recognised the paper’s vision and impact, leading to new directions of research and the introduction of new applications into the hybrid systems research community.  

The paper, entitled Reachability Analysis of Controlled Discrete-Time Stochastic Hybrid Systems, was originally published at the HSCC Conference in March 2006. Co-authored by Abate, the department’s Professor of Verification and Control, it laid the foundations for a class of dynamical models endowed with uncertainty, known as Stochastic Hybrid Systems, which have become the foundation of modern Cyber-Physical Systems. These are complex engineering systems where physical/analogue features combine with cyber/digital components, and they lie at the core of embedded (e.g. smart energy) systems and modern end-to-end AI applications.  

The paper also provided a new, probabilistic approach to the concept of reachability, i.e.: with what likelihood is the model capable of reaching a certain state-space configuration over time? Can we compute this quantity in ways that are algorithmically and numerically precise? These questions underpin much safety-critical work in areas of computer science, engineering, and modern AI.  

I am honoured to receive this award from the HSCC community, which I recognise as having shaped many of my research interests. I am glad to see that my work, which goes back to my doctoral studies and spans areas across formal verification and control theory, has been recognised for its significance and impact. It's exciting to be continuing this line of work here at Oxford: there is still so much more to understand and to develop. Professor Alessandro Abate

The contribution of Abate and his team has since been expanded by groups across the world and has been incorporated into several industrial applications, particularly in the areas of assured autonomy and of smart energy systems, in collaboration with key industrial partners. Additional work in the area has been carried out by OXCAV (Oxford Control and Verification), a research group headed by Abate at the department. Find out more: https://oxcav.web.ox.ac.uk/  

This year’s ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control is the 27th in a series of conferences on all aspects of hybrid systems, and was held in Hong Kong in May. The events aim to advance design and analysis techniques that bridge control theory and computer science, expanding to new domains in security and privacy, and in systems biology. 

Read the full paper Reachability Analysis of Controlled Discrete-Time Stochastic Hybrid Systems here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/11730637_7  

A separate article by Abate, co-authored by Research Associate Alec Edwards and former student Andrea Peruffo, was presented at this year's conference, winning the Best RE Award. Find out more at: https://hscc.acm.org/2024/best-re-award/