Exact synchronization in partial deterministic automata

An automaton is a synchronizing if it has an input word that transfers it from any state to a particular state. There are two versions of synchronization in partial deterministic automata: Careful synchronization and exact synchronization. In this paper we focus on the exact version; we survey the complexity of testing exact synchronization and describe a SAT solver based algorithm for calculating the length of the shortest exact synchronizing word. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd

IST Austria Technical Report

Concurrent data structures with fine-grained synchronization are notoriously difficult to implement correctly. The difficulty of reasoning about these implementations does not stem from the number of variables or the program size, but rather from the large number of possible interleavings. These implementations are therefore prime candidates for model checking. We introduce an algorithm for verifying linearizability of singly-linked heap-based concurrent data structures. We consider a model consisting of an unbounded heap where each node consists an element from an unbounded data domain, with a restricted set of operations for testing and updating pointers and data elements. Our main result is that linearizability is decidable for programs that invoke a fixed number of methods, possibly in parallel. This decidable fragment covers many of the common implementation techniques — fine-grained locking, lazy synchronization, and lock-free synchronization. We also show how the technique can be used to verify optimistic implementations with the help of programmer annotations. We developed a verification tool CoLT and evaluated it on a representative sample of Java implementations of the concurrent set data structure. The tool verified linearizability of a number of implementations, found a known error in a lock-free imple- mentation and proved that the corrected version is linearizable

Careful synchronization of partial deterministic finite automata

We approach the task of computing a carefully synchronizing word of minimum length for a given partial deterministic automaton, encoding the problem as an instance of SAT and invoking a SAT solver. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach gives satisfactory results for automata with up to 100 states even if very modest computational resources are used. We compare our results with the ones obtained by the first author for exact synchronization, which is another version of synchronization studied in the literature, and draw some theoretical conclusions. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Minobrnauka: FEUZ-2020-0016Supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation, project FEUZ-2020-0016

On Object Oriented Nondeterministic Supervisory Control

Implementation of complex discrete event fabrication processes can be considerably simplified by use of general reusable software modules representing the physical components. At the same time, construction of the control system can be facilitated by applying the supervisory control theory for the automatic generation of control laws. These two aspects can be joined into a general concept with object-oriented modeling and control law synthesis as foundations. The goal is to allow an operator to specify operation lists describing the required sequences of operations for the manufacturing of the product, independently of constraints given by a specific plant. With a suitable model of the capabilities and constraints of the resources of that plant, a product route can be automatically generated from the operation list. Such a product route describes all available paths through the system, for each type of product, irrespective of any other type of product that may be simultaneously present within the production system. Given a set of product routes and a model of the plant, control laws guaranteeing production according to those product specifications can be synthesized. Based on the supervisory control theory, using interleaved product routes as specification, we show how such control laws can be synthesized. An added complexity is that the specification becomes non-deterministic, in the sense that the same string of events can lead to different system states. We show that the supervisory control theory can be used with non-deterministic specifications assuming certain properties. An algorithm for synthesis of a non-deterministic supervisor is presented. We also describe an object-oriented modeling approach to discrete event fabrication processes. It is shown that the properties that have been defined as necessary for the non-deterministic supervisory approach are immediate by the modeling approach. Thus, we show that the approach to non-deterministic supervisory control can be combined with object-oriented modeling techniques, and so we have a powerful framework for implementing control of large and complex discrete event fabrication processes