Ant colonies for Temporal Logic falsification of hybrid systems

The Extended Ant Colony Optimization (EACO) metaheuristic is applied to the problem of Metric Temporal Logic (MTL) falsification of nonautonomous hybrid systems. The goal of the MTL falsification problem is to detect operating conditions and input signals that will generate system trajectories that do not satisfy a user provided specification in MTL. A new method for parameterizing the input space using splines and Hermitian polynomials is introduced and the performance of the new algorithm is compared against Monte Carlo testing techniques. It is envisioned that this work will help practitioners in designing complex control or mixed-signal systems.