Distributed embedded systems have started to transform the role of computing technology in all sectors of our society. Applications include transport systems, building technology, energy management, health care, infrastructure, and environmental protection. These applications constitute a disruptive technology with the potential of vast savings in terms of energy, environmental pollution, and implementation costs. The flipside of these benefits is the potential for significant economical and possibly even life-threatening damage that could be caused if a distributed system fails to function as intended. Designing distributed systems that are safe, stable, and robust is difficult, because local design decisions may have global consequences, and many objectives can only be realized when multiple components cooperate.
Reactive synthesis has the potential to revolutionize the development of distributed embedded systems. From a given logical specification, the synthesis algorithm automatically constructs an implementation that is correct-by-design. The vision is that a designer analyzes the design objectives with a synthesis tool, automatically identifies competing or contradictory requirements, and obtains an error-free prototype implementation. Coding and testing, the most expensive stages of development, are eliminated from the development process. Recent case studies from robotic control and from hardware design, such as the automatic synthesis of the AMBA AHB bus controller, demonstrate that this vision is in principle feasible. However, previously known synthesis algorithms do not scale to large systems. Even if successful, the algorithms produce code that is much larger and much more complicated than the code produced by human programmers for the same specification.
In the OSARES project, we address both of these fundamental shortcomings at the same time. The goal of the project is to develop output-sensitive synthesis algorithms, i.e. algorithms that, in addition to optimal performance in the size of the specification, also perform optimally in the size and structural complexity of the implementation. Target applications for our algorithms come from both the classic areas of reactive synthesis, such as hardware circuits, and from new and much more challenging application areas such as the distributed coordination of autonomous vehicles and manufacturing robots, which are far beyond the reach of the currently available synthesis algorithms.
