Scalable Zonotopic Under-approximation of Backward Reachable Sets for Uncertain Linear Systems

Zonotopes are widely used for over-approximating forward reachable sets of uncertain linear systems. In this paper, we use zonotopes to achieve more scalable algorithms that under-approximate backward reachable sets for uncertain linear systems. The main difference is that the backward reachability analysis is a two-player game and involves Minkowski difference operations, but zonotopes are not closed under such operations. We under-approximate this Minkowski difference with a zonotope, which can be obtained by solving a linear optimization problem. We further develop an efficient zonotope order reduction technique to bound the complexity of the obtained zonotopic under-approximations. The proposed approach is evaluated against existing approaches using randomly generated instances, and illustrated with an aircraft position control system.