12,775 research outputs found
Benchmarks for Parity Games (extended version)
We propose a benchmark suite for parity games that includes all benchmarks
that have been used in the literature, and make it available online. We give an
overview of the parity games, including a description of how they have been
generated. We also describe structural properties of parity games, and using
these properties we show that our benchmarks are representative. With this work
we provide a starting point for further experimentation with parity games.Comment: The corresponding tool and benchmarks are available from
https://github.com/jkeiren/paritygame-generator. This is an extended version
of the paper that has been accepted for FSEN 201
Reasoning about LTL Synthesis over finite and infinite games
In the last few years, research formal methods for the analysis and the verification of properties of systems has increased greatly. A meaningful contribution in this area has been given by algorithmic methods developed in the context of synthesis. The basic idea is simple and appealing: instead of developing a system and verifying that it satisfies its specification, we look for an automated procedure that, given the specification returns a system that is correct by construction. Synthesis of reactive systems is one of the most popular variants of this problem, in which we want to synthesize a system characterized by an ongoing interaction with the environment. In this setting, large effort has been devoted to analyze specifications given as formulas of linear temporal logic, i.e., LTL synthesis.
Traditional approaches to LTL synthesis rely on transforming the LTL specification into parity deterministic automata, and then to parity games, for which a so-called winning region is computed. Computing such an automaton is, in the worst-case, double-exponential in the size of the LTL formula, and this becomes a computational bottleneck in using the synthesis process in practice.
The first part of this thesis is devoted to improve the solution of parity games as they are used in solving LTL synthesis, trying to give efficient techniques, in terms of running time and space consumption, for solving parity games. We start with the study and the implementation of an automata-theoretic technique to solve parity games. More precisely, we consider an algorithm introduced by Kupferman and Vardi that solves a parity game by solving the emptiness problem of a corresponding alternating parity automaton. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that this algorithm outperforms other algorithms when the game has a small number of priorities relative to the size of the game. In many concrete applications, we do indeed end up with parity games
where the number of priorities is relatively small. This makes the new algorithm quite useful in practice.
We then provide a broad investigation of the symbolic approach for solving parity games. Specifically, we implement in a fresh tool, called SPGSolver, four symbolic algorithms to solve parity games and compare their performances to the corresponding explicit versions for different classes of games. By means of benchmarks, we show that for random games, even for constrained random games, explicit algorithms actually perform better than symbolic algorithms. The situation changes, however, for structured games, where symbolic algorithms seem to have the advantage. This suggests that when evaluating algorithms for parity-game solving, it would be useful to have real benchmarks and not only random benchmarks, as the common practice has been.
LTL synthesis has been largely investigated also in artificial intelligence, and specifically in
automated planning. Indeed, LTL synthesis corresponds to fully observable nondeterministic planning in which the domain is given compactly and the goal is an LTL formula, that in turn is related to two-player games with LTL goals. Finding a strategy for these games means to synthesize a plan for the planning problem. The last part of this thesis is then dedicated to investigate LTL synthesis under this different view. In particular, we study a generalized form of planning under partial observability, in which we have multiple, possibly infinitely many, planning domains with the same actions and observations, and goals expressed over observations, which are possibly temporally extended. By building on work on two-player games with imperfect information in the Formal Methods literature, we devise a general technique, generalizing the belief-state construction, to remove partial observability. This reduces the planning problem to a game of perfect information with a tight correspondence between plans and strategies. Then we instantiate the technique and solve some generalized planning problems
Sciduction: Combining Induction, Deduction, and Structure for Verification and Synthesis
Even with impressive advances in automated formal methods, certain problems
in system verification and synthesis remain challenging. Examples include the
verification of quantitative properties of software involving constraints on
timing and energy consumption, and the automatic synthesis of systems from
specifications. The major challenges include environment modeling,
incompleteness in specifications, and the complexity of underlying decision
problems.
This position paper proposes sciduction, an approach to tackle these
challenges by integrating inductive inference, deductive reasoning, and
structure hypotheses. Deductive reasoning, which leads from general rules or
concepts to conclusions about specific problem instances, includes techniques
such as logical inference and constraint solving. Inductive inference, which
generalizes from specific instances to yield a concept, includes algorithmic
learning from examples. Structure hypotheses are used to define the class of
artifacts, such as invariants or program fragments, generated during
verification or synthesis. Sciduction constrains inductive and deductive
reasoning using structure hypotheses, and actively combines inductive and
deductive reasoning: for instance, deductive techniques generate examples for
learning, and inductive reasoning is used to guide the deductive engines.
We illustrate this approach with three applications: (i) timing analysis of
software; (ii) synthesis of loop-free programs, and (iii) controller synthesis
for hybrid systems. Some future applications are also discussed
Qualitative Analysis of POMDPs with Temporal Logic Specifications for Robotics Applications
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), that are
a standard framework for robotics applications to model uncertainties present
in the real world, with temporal logic specifications. All temporal logic
specifications in linear-time temporal logic (LTL) can be expressed as parity
objectives. We study the qualitative analysis problem for POMDPs with parity
objectives that asks whether there is a controller (policy) to ensure that the
objective holds with probability 1 (almost-surely). While the qualitative
analysis of POMDPs with parity objectives is undecidable, recent results show
that when restricted to finite-memory policies the problem is EXPTIME-complete.
While the problem is intractable in theory, we present a practical approach to
solve the qualitative analysis problem. We designed several heuristics to deal
with the exponential complexity, and have used our implementation on a number
of well-known POMDP examples for robotics applications. Our results provide the
first practical approach to solve the qualitative analysis of robot motion
planning with LTL properties in the presence of uncertainty
Automatic Music Composition using Answer Set Programming
Music composition used to be a pen and paper activity. These these days music
is often composed with the aid of computer software, even to the point where
the computer compose parts of the score autonomously. The composition of most
styles of music is governed by rules. We show that by approaching the
automation, analysis and verification of composition as a knowledge
representation task and formalising these rules in a suitable logical language,
powerful and expressive intelligent composition tools can be easily built. This
application paper describes the use of answer set programming to construct an
automated system, named ANTON, that can compose melodic, harmonic and rhythmic
music, diagnose errors in human compositions and serve as a computer-aided
composition tool. The combination of harmonic, rhythmic and melodic composition
in a single framework makes ANTON unique in the growing area of algorithmic
composition. With near real-time composition, ANTON reaches the point where it
can not only be used as a component in an interactive composition tool but also
has the potential for live performances and concerts or automatically generated
background music in a variety of applications. With the use of a fully
declarative language and an "off-the-shelf" reasoning engine, ANTON provides
the human composer a tool which is significantly simpler, more compact and more
versatile than other existing systems. This paper has been accepted for
publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP).Comment: 31 pages, 10 figures. Extended version of our ICLP2008 paper.
Formatted following TPLP guideline
Dagstuhl Reports : Volume 1, Issue 2, February 2011
Online Privacy: Towards Informational Self-Determination on the Internet (Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 11061) : Simone Fischer-Hübner, Chris Hoofnagle, Kai Rannenberg, Michael Waidner, Ioannis Krontiris and Michael Marhöfer Self-Repairing Programs (Dagstuhl Seminar 11062) : Mauro Pezzé, Martin C. Rinard, Westley Weimer and Andreas Zeller Theory and Applications of Graph Searching Problems (Dagstuhl Seminar 11071) : Fedor V. Fomin, Pierre Fraigniaud, Stephan Kreutzer and Dimitrios M. Thilikos Combinatorial and Algorithmic Aspects of Sequence Processing (Dagstuhl Seminar 11081) : Maxime Crochemore, Lila Kari, Mehryar Mohri and Dirk Nowotka Packing and Scheduling Algorithms for Information and Communication Services (Dagstuhl Seminar 11091) Klaus Jansen, Claire Mathieu, Hadas Shachnai and Neal E. Youn
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