3D Environment Modeling for Falsification and Beyond with Scenic 3.0

TL;DR

This paper introduces Scenic 3.0, a significant upgrade to a probabilistic language for modeling 3D environments in cyber-physical systems, enabling more complex and realistic simulations with new syntax, shape modeling, and temporal logic support.

Contribution

Scenic 3.0 extends the language with native 3D support, complex shape modeling, occlusion-aware visibility, and temporal logic, broadening its application scope and modeling capabilities.

Findings

Enhanced 3D environment modeling capabilities

Support for complex shapes and occlusion-aware visibility

Application to new case studies in CPS design

Abstract

We present a major new version of Scenic, a probabilistic programming language for writing formal models of the environments of cyber-physical systems. Scenic has been successfully used for the design and analysis of CPS in a variety of domains, but earlier versions are limited to environments which are essentially two-dimensional. In this paper, we extend Scenic with native support for 3D geometry, introducing new syntax which provides expressive ways to describe 3D configurations while preserving the simplicity and readability of the language. We replace Scenic's simplistic representation of objects as boxes with precise modeling of complex shapes, including a ray tracing-based visibility system that accounts for object occlusion. We also extend the language to support arbitrary temporal requirements expressed in LTL, and build an extensible Scenic parser generated from a formal grammar of the language. Finally, we illustrate the new application domains these features enable with case studies that would have been impossible to accurately model in Scenic 2.