On the Skolem Problem for Continuous Linear Dynamical Systems
For researchers in dynamical systems and verification, this work advances the decidability frontier of a fundamental reachability problem, though conditional on an unproven conjecture.
The paper shows decidability of the bounded Continuous Skolem Problem under Schanuel's Conjecture, and reduces the unbounded problem to the bounded one under certain frequency conditions. It also shows that full decidability of the unbounded problem would imply a major new result in Diophantine approximation.
The Continuous Skolem Problem asks whether a real-valued function satisfying a linear differential equation has a zero in a given interval of real numbers. This is a fundamental reachability problem for continuous linear dynamical systems, such as linear hybrid automata and continuous-time Markov chains. Decidability of the problem is currently open---indeed decidability is open even for the sub-problem in which a zero is sought in a bounded interval. In this paper we show decidability of the bounded problem subject to Schanuel's Conjecture, a unifying conjecture in transcendental number theory. We furthermore analyse the unbounded problem in terms of the frequencies of the differential equation, that is, the imaginary parts of the characteristic roots. We show that the unbounded problem can be reduced to the bounded problem if there is at most one rationally linearly independent frequency, or if there are two rationally linearly independent frequencies and all characteristic roots are simple. We complete the picture by showing that decidability of the unbounded problem in the case of two (or more) rationally linearly independent frequencies would entail a major new effectiveness result in Diophantine approximation, namely computability of the Diophantine-approximation types of all real algebraic numbers.