Synthesis of concurrent systems with many similar sequential processes (extended abstract)

  • Authors:

  • P. C. Attie;E. A. Emerson

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin;Department of Computer Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin and Mathematics and Computing Science Department, Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • POPL '89 Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
  • Year:
  • 1989

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Abstract

Methods for synthesizing concurrent programs from Temporal Logic specifications based on the use of a decision procedure for testing temporal satisfiability have been proposed by Emerson & Clarke [EC82] and Manna & Wolper [MW84]. An important advantage of these synthesis methods is that they obviate the need to manually compose a program and manually construct a proof of its correctness. One only has to formulate a precise problem specification; the synthesis method then mechanically constructs a correct solution. A serious drawback of these methods in practice, however, is that they suffer from the state explosion problem. To synthesize a concurrent system consisting of K sequential processes, each having N states in its local transition diagram, requires construction of the global product-machine having at least NK global states in general. This exponential growth in K makes it infeasible to synthesize systems composed of more than 2 or 3 processes. In this paper, we show how to synthesize concurrent systems consisting of many (i.e., a finite but arbitrarily large number K of) similar sequential processes. Our approach avoids construction of the global product-machine for K processes; instead, it constructs a two process product-machine for a single pair of generic sequential processes. The method is uniform in K, providing a simple template that can be instantiated for each process to yield a solution for any fixed K. The method is also illustrated on synchronization problems from the literature.