Synthesizing biological theories
CAV'11 Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on Computer aided verification
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Automatic generation of correct software from requirements has long been a “holy grail” for system and software development. According to this vision, instead of implementing a system and then working hard to apply testing and verification methods to prove system correctness, a system is rather built correctly by construction. This problem, referred to as synthesis, is undecidable in the general case. However, by restricting the domain to decidable subsets, it is possible to bring this vision one step closer to reality. The focus of our study is reactive systems, or non-terminating programs that continuously receive input from an external environment and produce output responses. Reactive systems are often safety critical and include applications such as anti-lock braking systems, auto-pilots, and pacemakers. One of the challenges of reactive system design is ensuring that the software meets the requirements under the assumption of unpredictable environment input. The behavior of many of these systems can be expressed as regular languages over infinite strings, a domain in which synthesis has yielded successful results. We present a method for synthesizing executable reactive systems from formal requirements. The object-oriented requirements language of Live Sequence Charts (LSCs) is considered. We begin by establishing a mapping between various subsets of the language and finite-state formal models. We also consider LSCs which can express time constraints over a dense-time domain. From one of these models, we show how to formulate a winning strategy that is guaranteed to satisfy the requirements, provided one exists. The strategy is realized in the form of a controller which guides the system in choosing only non-violating behaviors. We describe an implementation of this work as an extension of an existing tool called the Play-Engine.