Scenarios, or Message Sequence Charts, offer an intuitive way of describing
the desired behaviors of a distributed protocol. In this paper we propose a new
way of specifying finite-state protocols using scenarios: we show that it is
possible to automatically derive a distributed implementation from a set of
scenarios augmented with a set of safety and liveness requirements, provided
the given scenarios adequately \emph{cover} all the states of the desired
implementation. We first derive incomplete state machines from the given
scenarios, and then synthesis corresponds to completing the transition relation
of individual processes so that the global product meets the specified
requirements. This completion problem, in general, has the same complexity,
PSPACE, as the verification problem, but unlike the verification problem, is
NP-complete for a constant number of processes. We present two algorithms for
solving the completion problem, one based on a heuristic search in the space of
possible completions and one based on OBDD-based symbolic fixpoint computation.
We evaluate the proposed methodology for protocol specification and the
effectiveness of the synthesis algorithms using the classical alternating-bit
protocol.Comment: This is the working draft of a paper currently in submission.
(February 10, 2014
