Environment Assumptions for Synthesis

Krishnendu Chatterjee, Thomas A. Henzinger, Barbara Jobstmann

Abstract: The synthesis problem asks to construct a reactive finite-state system from an ω-regular specification. Initial specifications are often unrealizable, which means that there is no system that implements the specification. A common reason for unrealizability is that assumptions on the environment of the system are incomplete. We study the problem of correcting an unrealizable specification ϕ by computing an environment assumption ψ such that the new specification ψ→ϕ is realizable. Our aim is to construct an assumption ψ that constrains only the environment and is as weak as possible. We present a two-step algorithm for computing assumptions. The algorithm operates on the game graph that is used to answer the realizability question. First, we compute a safety assumption that removes a minimal set of environment edges from the graph. Second, we compute a liveness assumption that puts fairness conditions on some of the remaining environment edges. We show that the problem of finding a minimal set of fair edges is computationally hard, and we use probabilistic games to compute a locally minimal fairness assumption.