Getting Started

In this section we review the recommended setup to start working with this package.

• Getting Started
• Setup
• Workflow tips
• Updating
• Optional dependencies
• Running the unit tests

Setup

This package requires Julia v1.0 or later. Refer to the official documentation on how to install it for your system. Below we explain the steps for setting up LazySets on your system and checking that it builds correctly.

Installation

To install LazySets, use the following command inside Julia's REPL:

julia> import Pkg; Pkg.add("LazySets")

or replace add by clone if you want to develop the code. The full list of dependencies (which are automatically installed) is specified in the Project.toml file.

Building the package

Use the following command from Julia's REPL:

julia> using LazySets

This should precompile the package and make it available afterward.

Workflow tips

There are different ways to use Julia: from the terminal, from the Julia REPL, from IJulia (i.e., Jupyter notebook), from Juno, etc. If you do not have a preferred choice, we recommend using LazySets through IJulia; one reason is that the visualization is conveniently embedded into the notebook, and it can be exported into different formats, among other benefits. On the other hand, for development purposes you probably want to use the REPL or the Juno environment.

Updating

After working with LazySets for some time, you may want to get the newest version. For this you can use the following command (e.g., from the REPL):

Pkg.checkout("LazySets")

That will check out the latest version in the master branch, and precompile it the next time you enter a session and execute using LazySets.

Optional dependencies

An optional dependency is a package that is not required to compile and use LazySets.jl, although some extra functionality is available provided that you load that package. Internally, optional dependencies in Julia are handled with the package Requires.jl.

For example, if you want to work with sets defined using simple algebraic expressions you can install and use Symbolics.jl.

julia> using LazySets, Symbolics

julia> var = @variables x[1:10]
(Num[x₁, x₂, x₃, x₄, x₅, x₆, x₇, x₈, x₉, x₁₀],)

julia> Hyperplane(x[1] + x[2] == 1/2, var)
Hyperplane{Float64,Array{Float64,1}}([1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0], 0.5)

defines the hyperplane $H : \{ x \in \mathbb{R}^{10} : x_1 + x_2 = 1/2\}$. The Hyperplane constructor (and other constructors) automatically work with Symbolics's variables once using Symbolics is ran in your session. Another optional dependency is Polyhedra.jl that is used whenever you want to work with concrete polyhedra representations in dimension higher than 2, e.g. to solve the vertex enumeration problem (converting from constraint to vertex representation of a polytope). There are many other optional dependencies. The following table summarizes each optional dependency and the features available when used together with LazySets.jl:

As a plotting backend we recommend using GR together with Plots; that is, do ] add Plots GR and then load Plots to use GR as default (2D) plotting backend.

Use the following command to install all optional dependencies:

julia> ] add CDDLib Distributions Expokit IntervalConstraintProgramming IntervalMatrices Makie MiniQhull Symbolics Optim Plots Polyhedra StaticArrays TaylorModels

In addition, to build the project's documentation locally you need to install Documenter.jl.

Running the unit tests

To run the full test suite, first install all the optional dependencies and then do

] test LazySets

It is possible to use optional flags to select a portion of tests to be run. See the script test/runtests.jl for details.