11,219 research outputs found
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
Playing Games in the Baire Space
We solve a generalized version of Church's Synthesis Problem where a play is
given by a sequence of natural numbers rather than a sequence of bits; so a
play is an element of the Baire space rather than of the Cantor space. Two
players Input and Output choose natural numbers in alternation to generate a
play. We present a natural model of automata ("N-memory automata") equipped
with the parity acceptance condition, and we introduce also the corresponding
model of "N-memory transducers". We show that solvability of games specified by
N-memory automata (i.e., existence of a winning strategy for player Output) is
decidable, and that in this case an N-memory transducer can be constructed that
implements a winning strategy for player Output.Comment: In Proceedings Cassting'16/SynCoP'16, arXiv:1608.0017
Impartial avoidance games for generating finite groups
We study an impartial avoidance game introduced by Anderson and Harary. The
game is played by two players who alternately select previously unselected
elements of a finite group. The first player who cannot select an element
without making the set of jointly-selected elements into a generating set for
the group loses the game. We develop criteria on the maximal subgroups that
determine the nim-numbers of these games and use our criteria to study our game
for several families of groups, including nilpotent, sporadic, and symmetric
groups.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures. Revised in response to comments from refere
The Variable Hierarchy for the Games mu-Calculus
Parity games are combinatorial representations of closed Boolean mu-terms. By
adding to them draw positions, they have been organized by Arnold and one of
the authors into a mu-calculus. As done by Berwanger et al. for the
propositional modal mu-calculus, it is possible to classify parity games into
levels of a hierarchy according to the number of fixed-point variables. We ask
whether this hierarchy collapses w.r.t. the standard interpretation of the
games mu-calculus into the class of all complete lattices. We answer this
question negatively by providing, for each n >= 1, a parity game Gn with these
properties: it unravels to a mu-term built up with n fixed-point variables, it
is semantically equivalent to no game with strictly less than n-2 fixed-point
variables
Exploiting the Temporal Logic Hierarchy and the Non-Confluence Property for Efficient LTL Synthesis
The classic approaches to synthesize a reactive system from a linear temporal
logic (LTL) specification first translate the given LTL formula to an
equivalent omega-automaton and then compute a winning strategy for the
corresponding omega-regular game. To this end, the obtained omega-automata have
to be (pseudo)-determinized where typically a variant of Safra's
determinization procedure is used. In this paper, we show that this
determinization step can be significantly improved for tool implementations by
replacing Safra's determinization by simpler determinization procedures. In
particular, we exploit (1) the temporal logic hierarchy that corresponds to the
well-known automata hierarchy consisting of safety, liveness, Buechi, and
co-Buechi automata as well as their boolean closures, (2) the non-confluence
property of omega-automata that result from certain translations of LTL
formulas, and (3) symbolic implementations of determinization procedures for
the Rabin-Scott and the Miyano-Hayashi breakpoint construction. In particular,
we present convincing experimental results that demonstrate the practical
applicability of our new synthesis procedure
K-Fibonacci sequences and minimal winning quota in Parsimonious game
Parsimonious games are a subset of constant sum homogeneous weighted majority
games unequivocally described by their free type representation vector. We show
that the minimal winning quota of parsimonious games satisfies a second order,
linear, homogeneous, finite difference equation with nonconstant coefficients
except for uniform games. We provide the solution of such an equation which may
be thought as the generalized version of the polynomial expansion of a proper
k-Fibonacci sequence. In addition we show that the minimal winning quota is a
symmetric function of the representation vector; exploiting this property it is
straightforward to prove that twin Parsimonious games, i.e. a couple of games
whose free type representations are each other symmetric, share the same
minimal winning quota
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