On the Existence of Compositional Barrier Certificates

This paper provides a necessary and sufficient condition for the compositional verification of a continuous system with additively separable barrier functions. The compositional safety verification enables the verification of an interconnection of subsystems. The idea behind the compositional analysis is to allow the verification of systems with a high dimension, by the verification of multiple lower dimensional subproblems. In the compositional safety analysis, a particular structure is imposed on the barrier certificate, restricting the applicability of the method.

We show an example of a system that cannot be verified using the compositional method, but can be verified using a centralized method. This example highlights how not to decompose systems, and should be used to guide the decomposition of a system into appropriate subsystems. Finally, we provide a second condition for the compositional safety analysis that enables the verification of the counterexample, by imposing a less restrictive structure of the barrier function. This shows that the counterexample can be solved with a compositional method, but at an increased computational complexity.