Stochastic Safety Verification Using Barrier Certificates

We develop a new method for safety verification of stochastic systems based on functions of states termed barrier certificates. Given a stochastic continuous or hybrid system and sets of initial and unsafe states, our method computes an upper bound on the probability that a trajectory of the system reaches the unsafe set, a bound whose validity is proven by the existence of a barrier certificate. For polynomial systems, both the upper bound and its corresponding barrier certificate can be computed using convex optimization, and hence the method is computationally tractable.