There is an increasing demand for controller design techniques capable of addressing the complex requirements of todays embedded applications. This demand has sparked the interest in symbolic control where lower complexity models of control systems are used to cater for complex specifications given by temporal logics, regular languages, or automata. These specification mechanisms can be regarded as qualitative since they divide the trajectories of the plant into bad trajectories (those that need to be avoided) and good trajectories. However, many applications require also the optimization of quantitative measures of the trajectories retained by the controller, as specified by a cost or utility function. As a first step towards the synthesis of controllers reconciling both qualitative and quantitative specifications, we investigate in this paper the use of symbolic models for time-optimal controller synthesis. We consider systems related by approximate (alternating) simulation relations and show how such relations enable the transfer of time-optimality information between the systems. We then use this insight to synthesize approximately time-optimal controllers for a control system by working with a lower complexity symbolic model. The resulting approximately time-optimal controllers are equipped with upper and lower bounds for the time to reach a target, describing the quality of the controller. The results described in this paper were implemented in the Matlab Toolbox Pessoa which we used to workout several illustrative examples reported in this paper.

17 pages, 2 figures, journal