Synthesis of concurrent programs for an atomic read/write model of computation

Abstract

Methods for mechanically synthesizing concurrent programs from temporal logic specifications have been proposed by Emerson and Clarke and by Manna and Wolper. 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. A serious drawback of these methods in practice, however, is that they produce concurrent programs for models of computation that are often unrealistic, involving highly centralized system architecture (Manna and Wolper), processes with global information about the system state (Emerson and Clarke), or reactive modules that can read all of their inputs in one atomic step (Anuchitanukul and Manna, and Pnueli and Rosner). Even simple synchronization protocols based on atomic read/write primitives such as Peterson's solution to the mutual exclusion problem have remained outside the scope of practical mechanical synthesis methods. In this paper, we show how to mechanically synthesize in more realistic computational models solutions to synchronization problems. We illustrate the method by synthesizing Peterson's solution to the mutual exclusion problem.An extended abstract containing some of these results was presented at the ACM Symposium on

Revising UNITY Programs: Possibilities and Limitations

“…In this case, we would force the program to always execute the second step of RA 1 (i.e., timed action IO 1 ) immediately after the first step (i.e., timed action RQ 1 ). Attie 1999;Attie and Emerson 2001], where the synchronization skeleton of a program is an abstract structure of the code of the program implementing inter-process synchronization. Although such synthesis methods may have differences with respect to the input specification language and the program model that they synthesize, the general approach is based on the satisfiability proof of the specification.…”

FTSyn: a framework for automatic synthesis of fault-tolerance

“…The definition of faults and fault-tolerance is adapted from Arora and Gouda [4] and Kulkarni [26]. The issues of modeling distributed programs is adapted from Kulkarni and Arora [27], and Attie and Emerson [7]. Program.…”

“…(The idea of grouping has also appeared in previous work [7,27].) As an example, consider a program consisting of variables a and b and let their domain be {0, 1}.…”

“…To automatically synthesize a fault-tolerant program, we can begin either with its formal specification (e.g., [6][7][8][9]19]), or with (the transitions of) the fault-intolerant version thereof (e.g., [27,28]). In the context where we need to upgrade an existing program, we follow the latter approach and reuse the existing program.…”

Revising Distributed UNITY Programs is NP-Complete

“…Existing synthesis methods in the literature mostly focus on deriving the synchronization skeleton of a program from its specification (expressed in terms of temporal logic expressions or finite-state automata) [1,3,9,15,16]. Although such synthesis methods may have differences with respect to the input specification language and the program model that they synthesize, the general approach is based on the satisfiability proof of the specification.…”