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On Computing the Minkowski Difference of Zonotopes

Zonotopes are becoming an increasingly popular set representation for formal verification techniques. This is mainly due to their efficient representation and their favorable computational complexity of important operations in high-dimensional spaces. In particular, zonotopes are closed under Minkowski addition and linear maps, which can be very efficiently implemented. Unfortunately, zonotopes are not closed under Minkowski difference for dimensions greater than two. However, we present an algorithm that efficiently computes a halfspace representation of the Minkowski difference of two zonotopes. In addition, we present an efficient algorithm that computes an approximation of the Minkowski difference in generator representation. The efficiency of the proposed solution is demonstrated by numerical experiments. These experiments show a reduced computation time in comparison to that when first the halfspace representation of zonotopes is obtained and the Minkowski difference is performed subsequently.