Hybrid systems are a modeling approach for interacting discrete-time and continuous-time phenomena. Probably the best introduction is via a pair of canonical examples.

First, consider the dynamics of a ball bouncing up and down on the ground. Most of the time its motion is governed by Newton’s laws. When it hits the ground, we have a modeling choice. We can try to model the deformation of the ball, the transfer of energy and resulting acceleration and deceleration (complicated) or use what we know about how balls bounce: the velocity vector gets turned around and reduced by some scaling factor (much easier). This second approach is the hybrid system model, because there are discontinuities in the state of the ball that happen at discrete times.

As another example, let’s look at a thermostat. Most thermostats function by turning a heat source on and off—there is no intermediate output. The system state is just the temperature of the room. When the heater is on, this state evolves according to one differential equation (hopefully one that causes temperature to increase); when it is off it follows a different equation. The thermostat is able to switch between these vector fields in response to the state of the system.

These two examples capture the two main features hybrid systems are designed for:

1. the possibility for discontinuous changes in the state of the system (bouncing ball)
2. the possibility for discontinuous changes in the equations of motion for the system (thermostat)

A common formalism for hybrid systems comes from, essentially, gluing a finite state machine to some continuous state spaces and continuous-time dynamics.

Definition. A hybrid system is given by a directed graph $$G$$, together with a smooth manifold $$S_v$$ (possibly with boundary) for each vertex $$v$$ of $$G$$, endowed with a vector field $$X_v$$, and for each edge $$e: u \to v$$ of $$G$$, an embedded submanifold $$G_e$$ of $$S_u$$ (called a guard) and a smooth map $$r_e: G_e \to S_v$$ (called a reset map).

The semantics aren’t hard to understand once you get the idea. The state of the system may be in any one of the spaces $$S_u$$, and evolves according to the vector field $$X_u$$. If the state hits one of the guards $$G_e$$, it is instantaneously sent to the next space $$S_v$$ via the reset map $$r_e$$.

For the bouncing ball, $$G$$ is the graph with one vertex $$u$$ and one edge $$e: u \to u$$. The state space $$S_u$$ is $$\Reals_{\geq 0} \times \Reals$$, consisting of the (positive) position and (signed) velocity of the ball. The guard manifold $$G_e$$ is $$0 \times \Reals_{\leq 0}$$, capturing the events where the ball is on the ground with negative velocity. The reset map $$r_e$$ sends $$(0,v)$$ to $$(0,-cv)$$, where $$0 < c < 1$$ is the coefficient of restitution of the ball. The vector field $$X_u$$ is determined by gravity: $$(\dot{x},\dot{v}) = (v,-g)$$.

For the thermostat, there are two vertices in the graph, corresponding to the two possible states of the controller. $$S_{\text{on}} = S_{\text{off}} = \Reals$$, and there is an edge from $$\text{off}$$ to $$\text{on}$$ and one from $$\text{on}$$ to $$\text{off}$$. The thermostat has a temperature $$T_{\text{on}}$$ at which it turns on the heater, and a temperature $$T_{\text{off}}$$ at which it turns it off. These two points are the guard manifolds, and somewhat confusingly, $$G_{\text{on}\to \text{off}} = T_{\text{off}}$$, $$G_{\text{off}\to\text{on}} = T_{\text{on}}$$. The reset maps are the natural inclusion, so the only difference is in the vector fields. I won’t try to describe these, because modeling heat flow is not my deal.

Hybrid systems can display behavior (some might call it pathological) that is not exhibited by either discrete- or continuous-time systems. Let’s take another look at the ball. Because the coefficient of restitution is less than 1, the ball’s speed decreases every time it hits the guard manifold, and so each time its bounce height decreases. Because the acceleration due to gravity is constant, the time between bounces decreases geometrically. So the transition times when it hits the guard set accumulate at a certain point, and it’s hard to define what happens to the system after that time. This is called Zeno behavior, since the ball seems to actually carry out the sequence of actions Zeno argued you must in order to go from point A to point B: go half the distance, then go half the distance remaining, and so forth. It’s typically seen as a problem in a hybrid system, since it’s not typically physically realizable, and may lead to undefined behavior.

A while back someone told me about a PhD thesis that somehow managed to apply the theory of model categories to hybrid systems. I couldn’t find anything about this at the time, but I recently uncovered it. The dissertation of legend is actually two: Aaron Ames wrote an engineering PhD thesis and a mathematics masters thesis covering two sides of the story. As is the norm in the world of engineering, this turned into a bunch of other papers (and those are just the ones about a very small segment of the thesis).

There are a lot of interesting ideas in these theses, both about hybrid systems and other stuff. I was pleased to find that these constructions are basically cryptomorphic versions of cellular sheaves and cosheaves.

A categorical hybrid system interprets the underlying graph $$G$$ of the hybrid system as a category $$\mathcal{G}$$ with one object for each edge and one object for each vertex. Each attachment between an edge and a vertex is realized by a morphism from the edge to the vertex. (This is not quite the incidence category of a regular cell complex, since there may be self-loops.) We also want to keep track of the orientation of each edge, so there’s a bit of extra structure tagging each incidence morphism with the information of whether it goes toward the source of the edge or the target of the edge. A categorical hybrid system is just a functor $$\mathcal{X}: \mathcal{G} \to \mathbf{Man}$$ to the category of smooth manifolds.

To upgrade a traditional hybrid system into a categorical one, we let $$\mathcal{X}(v) = X_v$$ and $$\mathcal{X}(e) = G_e$$. The action of $$\mathcal{X}$$ on morphisms is as follows. Each edge has two outgoing morphisms $$e_s$$ and $$e_t$$, going to its source and target vertices. $$\mathcal{X}(e_s)$$ should be the inclusion map $$G_e \hookrightarrow X_{s(e)}$$, while $$\mathcal{X}(e_t)$$ should be the reset map $$r_e: G_e \to X_{t(e)}$$. The actual dynamics of the system are added to the vertex stalks afterwards; we think of $$\mathcal{X}$$ as being a “hybrid state space” on which we can define any dynamics we please.

I like thinking about these as cellular cosheaves, even though that’s not quite technically correct, both because I’m comfortable with that language, but also because you can kind of think of the execution of a hybrid system as a sort of holonomic walk over the underlying graph. We can take the colimit of the functor $$\mathcal{X}$$ (in a suitable category of topological spaces) to get a genuine space where the dynamics happen. The colimit forgets some topological information about the discrete part of the system. If we want to preserve this, we can take the homotopy colimit. It turns out that if the homotopy colimit of one of these categorical hybrid systems is contractible, Zeno behavior cannot occur (regardless of choice of vector fields).

This result sounds very alluring, but I couldn’t actually find an explicit proof of it. The closest I found was an explanation that if the underlying graph of the hybrid system has no directed cycles, then Zeno behavior is impossible, because there can only be finitely many state transitions. If the homotopy colimit is simply connected, the underlying graph must have no cycles. After this explanation, the result no longer seems quite so deep—it’s something we could have deduced without any of the algebraic topology. In fact, by looking at the underlying graph itself, we actually get a finer invariant, because we can look for directed cycles rather than any sort of cycle.

As an example, the thermostat cannot exhibit Zeno behavior as long as the on and off temperatures are separated by a positive distance and the vector fields are fixed. This is because it always takes the same amount of time to go between the temperatures. But both the colimit of the corresponding hybrid functor and the homotopy colimit are homeomorphic to $$S^1$$. We can’t rule out Zeno behavior by the homotopy condition. On the other hand, this criterion does correctly indicate that Zeno behavior is possible for the bouncing ball, but only if you take the homotopy colimit. The standard colimit is just a cone, while the homotopy colimit is a cylinder.

The masters thesis is dedicated to exploring the homotopy theory of these categorical hybrid systems. Ames constructs a model category structure for the category of hybrid functors, which recovers the homotopy theory of the homotopy colimit. You can compute homotopy or homology using something like the Bousfield-Kan spectral sequence. The second page of this spectral sequence is essentially given by taking stalkwise homology of the cosheaf and computing cosheaf homology.

There may be more to this than I’ve been able to uncover, though. A couple papers hint at using the actual vector fields of the hybrid system to define a sort of Morse homology, which might be a better way to identify non-Zeno behavior. But that project doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. Instead, Ames is a successful researcher at Caltech building robots, with the only category theory or homological algebra relegated to diagrams on his website.

I guess this is a lesson about using fancy math to solve real problems. It takes a lot of work—much more than just a dissertation—to take an idea (“hybrid systems are functors”) from abstract mathematics to anywhere near an application. And the incentives often aren’t there to carry a program like that through to completion, even if it might end up being useful. I am, of course, unable to resist speculating about other high-powered tools that might be brought to bear on the problem. Trajectories of a hybrid system are directed, so maybe directed algebraic topology has something meaningful to say. Or maybe the theory of stratified spaces might be useful in understanding the colimit of one of these hybrid functors. But there are no guarantees, and without a clear motivating problem, it’s not likely that this line of research will ever, say, produce novel guarantees about the behavior of hybrid systems.

I do think the analogy with cellular cosheaves helped me understand the structure of hybrid systems better. Maybe the real benefit of work like this is giving mathematicians a way to readily understand and compartmentalize what more applied researchers are doing.