Asynchronous Games over Tree Architectures

We consider the task of controlling in a distributed way a Zielonka asynchronous automaton. Every process of a controller has access to its causal past to determine the next set of actions it proposes to play. An action can be played only if every process controlling this action proposes to play it. We consider reachability objectives: every process should reach its set of final states. We show that this control problem is decidable for tree architectures, where every process can communicate with its parent, its children, and with the environment. The complexity of our algorithm is l-fold exponential with l being the height of the tree representing the architecture. We show that this is unavoidable by showing that even for three processes the problem is EXPTIME-complete, and that it is non-elementary in general

Negotiation Games

Negotiations, a model of concurrency with multi party negotiation as primitive, have been recently introduced by J. Desel and J. Esparza. We initiate the study of games for this model. We study coalition problems: can a given coalition of agents force that a negotiation terminates (resp. block the negotiation so that it goes on forever)?; can the coalition force a given outcome of the negotiation? We show that for arbitrary negotiations the problems are EXPTIME-complete. Then we show that for sound and deterministic or even weakly deterministic negotiations the problems can be solved in PTIME. Notice that the input of the problems is a negotiation, which can be exponentially more compact than its state space.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2015, arXiv:1509.06858. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1405.682

Petri Games: Synthesis of Distributed Systems with Causal Memory

We present a new multiplayer game model for the interaction and the flow of information in a distributed system. The players are tokens on a Petri net. As long as the players move in independent parts of the net, they do not know of each other; when they synchronize at a joint transition, each player gets informed of the causal history of the other player. We show that for Petri games with a single environment player and an arbitrary bounded number of system players, deciding the existence of a safety strategy for the system players is EXPTIME-complete.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2014, arXiv:1408.556

On the Control of Asynchronous Automata

The decidability of the distributed version of the Ramadge and Wonham controller synthesis problem,where both the plant and the controllers are modeled as asynchronous automataand the controllers have causal memoryis a challenging open problem.There exist three classes of plants for which the existence of a correct controller with causal memory has been shown decidable: when the dependency graph of actions is series-parallel, when the processes are connectedly communicating and when the dependency graph of processes is a tree. We design a class of plants, called decomposable games, with a decidable controller synthesis problem.This provides a unified proof of the three existing decidability results as well as new examples of decidable plants

Efficient Trace Encodings of Bounded Synthesis for Asynchronous Distributed Systems

The manual implementation of distributed systems is an error-prone task because of the asynchronous interplay of components and the environment. Bounded synthesis automatically generates an implementation for the specification of the distributed system if one exists. So far, bounded synthesis for distributed systems does not utilize their asynchronous nature. Instead, concurrent behavior of components is encoded by all interleavings and only then checked against the specification. We close this gap by identifying true concurrency in synthesis of asynchronous distributed systems represented as Petri games. This defines when several interleavings can be subsumed by one true concurrent trace. Thereby, fewer and shorter verification problems have to be solved in each iteration of the bounded synthesis algorithm. For Petri games, experimental results show that our implementation using true concurrency outperforms the implementation based on checking all interleavings

Translating Asynchronous Games for Distributed Synthesis (Full Version)

In distributed synthesis, we generate a set of process implementations that, together, accomplish an objective against all possible behaviors of the environment. A lot of recent work has focussed on systems with causal memory, i.e., sets of asynchronous processes that exchange their causal histories upon synchronization. Decidability results for this problem have been stated either in terms of control games, which extend Zielonka's asynchronous automata by partitioning the actions into controllable and uncontrollable, or in terms of Petri games, which extend Petri nets by partitioning the tokens into system and environment players. The precise connection between these two models was so far, however, an open question. In this paper, we provide the first formal connection between control games and Petri games. We establish the equivalence of the two game models based on weak bisimulations between their strategies. For both directions, we show that a game of one type can be translated into an equivalent game of the other type. We provide exponential upper and lower bounds for the translations. Our translations make it possible to transfer and combine decidability results between the two types of games. Exemplarily, we translate decidability in acyclic communication architectures, originally obtained for control games, to Petri games, and decidability in single-process systems, originally obtained for Petri games, to control games

Synthesis of asynchronous distributed systems from global specifications

The synthesis problem asks whether there exists an implementation for a given formal specification and derives such an implementation if it exists. This approach enables engineers to think on a more abstract level about what a system should achieve instead of how it should accomplish its goal. The synthesis problem is often represented by a game between system players and environment players. Petri games define the synthesis problem for asynchronous distributed systems with causal memory. So far, decidability results for Petri games are mainly obtained for local winning conditions, which is limiting as global properties like mutual exclusion cannot be expressed. In this thesis, we make two contributions. First, we present decidability and undecidability results for Petri games with global winning conditions. The global safety winning condition of bad markings defines markings that the players have to avoid. We prove that the existence of a winning strategy for the system players in Petri games with a bounded number of system players, at most one environment player, and bad markings is decidable. The global liveness winning condition of good markings defines markings that the players have to reach. We prove that the existence of a winning strategy for the system players in Petri games with at least two system players, at least three environment players, and good markings is undecidable. Second, we present semi-decision procedures to find winning strategies for the system players in Petri games with global winning conditions and without restrictions on the distribution of players. The distributed nature of Petri games is employed by proposing encodings with true concurrency. We implement the semi-decision procedures in a corresponding tool.Das Syntheseproblem stellt die Frage, ob eine Implementierung f ¨ur eine Spezifikation existiert, und generiert eine solche Implementierung, falls sie existiert. Diese Vorgehensweise erlaubt es Programmierenden sich mehr darauf zu konzentrieren, was ein System erreichen soll, und weniger darauf, wie die Spezifikation erf ¨ ullt werden soll. Das Syntheseproblem wird oft als Spiel zwischen einem System- und einem Umgebungsspieler dargestellt. Petri-Spiele definieren das Syntheseproblem f ¨ur asynchrone verteilte Systeme mit kausalem Speicher. Bisher wurden Resultate bez¨uglich der Entscheidbarkeit von Petri-Spiele meist f ¨ur lokale Gewinnbedingungen gefunden. In dieser Arbeit pr¨asentieren wir zuerst Resultate bez¨uglich der Entscheidbarkeit und Unentscheidbarkeit von Petri-Spielen mit globalen Gewinnbedingungen. Wir beweisen, dass die Existenz einer gewinnenden Strategie f ¨ur die Systemspieler in Petri- Spielen mit einer beschr¨ankten Anzahl an Systemspielern, h¨ochstens einem Umgebungsspieler und schlechten Markierungen entscheidbar ist. Wir beweisen ebenfalls, dass die Existenz einer gewinnenden Strategie f ¨ur die Systemspieler in Petri-Spielen mit mindestens zwei Systemspielern, mindestens drei Umgebungsspielern und guten Markierungen unentscheidbar ist. Danach pr¨asentieren wir Semi-Entscheidungsprozeduren, um gewinnende Strategien f ¨ur die Systemspieler in Petri-Spielen mit globalen Gewinnbedingungen und ohne Restriktionen f ¨ur die Verteilung von Spielern zu finden. Wir benutzen die verteilte Natur von Petri-Spielen, indem wir Enkodierungen einf ¨uhren, die Nebenl¨aufigkeit ausnutzen. Die Semi-Entscheidungsprozeduren sind in einem entsprechenden Tool implementiert