Data-Driven Safety Verification using Barrier Certificates and Matrix Zonotopes

Ensuring safety in cyber-physical systems (CPSs) is a critical challenge, especially when system models are difficult to obtain or cannot be fully trusted due to uncertainty, modeling errors, or environmental disturbances. Traditional model-based approaches rely on precise system dynamics, which may not be available in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose a data-driven safety verification framework that leverages matrix zonotopes and barrier certificates to verify system safety directly from noisy data. Instead of trusting a single unreliable model, we construct a set of models that capture all possible system dynamics that align with the observed data, ensuring that the true system model is always contained within this set. This model set is compactly represented using matrix zonotopes, enabling efficient computation and propagation of uncertainty. By integrating this representation into a barrier certificate framework, we establish rigorous safety guarantees without requiring an explicit system model. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in verifying safety for dynamical systems with unknown models, showcasing its potential for real-world CPS applications.

@article{oumer2025_2504.01007,
  title={ Data-Driven Safety Verification using Barrier Certificates and Matrix Zonotopes },
  author={ Mohammed Adib Oumer and Amr Alanwar and Majid Zamani },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.01007},
  year={ 2025 }
}