Automatic synthesis of distributed systems

Abstract

Summary form only given. Our research aims towards a new method of synthesis for distributed systems using Mazurkiewicz traces for specification and asynchronous automata for models. Mazurkiewicz trace languages are languages closed under an explicit independence relation between actions and therefore they are suitable to describe concurrent behaviour. The main objectives of this work are: (a) to develop a specification language based on a distributed version of temporal logic on traces that is able to express properties about the independence of actions; (b) to design a synthesis procedure based on improvements and heuristics of the algorithms for asynchronous automata; (c) to implement the new procedure efficiently (and so to turn the theory into a reliable tool that can be used in practice); (d) to apply it to case studies in areas like small distributed algorithms (e.g. mutual exclusion, communication protocols) and asynchronous circuit design. The idea used for the core of the synthesis procedure is that of unfoldings, a successful technique based on branching time partial order semantics. Promising preliminary results were obtained: we were able to automatically synthesize mutual exclusion algorithms from regular trace specifications.