Abstract:Barrier certificates have been widely used in verification of continuous systems.The main idea is to find a barrier which separates the reachable set from the unsafe set such that all the trajectories starting from the initial set will never go across the barrier.Thus the system's safety can be guaranteed by constructing a barrier.In recent years, barrier certificates have been successfully used for verification of continuous systems with unbounded time.However sometimes the safety for bounded time needs to be addressed.Since a system is unsafe with unbounded time cannot imply it is also unsafe with a bounded time, the unbounded time barrier certificate method could fail to verify the safety with bounded time.In this paper, a method is presented to generate a bounded time barrier certificate for safety verification of continuous systems with bounded time.Some sufficient conditions for the bounded time barrier certificate are specified.If the continuous system is a polynomial system, relax all the conditions of positive semi-definite polynomial to the sum of squares(SOS) polynomial and then use semi-definite programming(SDP) to solve the conditions for a bounded time barrier certificate;if the continuous system is an elementary system(containing some elementary functions), transform it to a polynomial system approximately, and then solve the corresponding polynomial system for a bounded time barrier certificate.For some practical examples which are unsafe for unbounded time, the paper shows the effectiveness of the proposed method for generating bounded time barriers.