Dependency-based Compositional Synthesis

Despite many recent advances, reactive synthesis is still not really a practical technique. The grand challenge is to scale from small transition systems, where synthesis performs well, to complex multi-component designs. Compositional methods, such as the construction of dominant strategies for individual components, reduce the complexity significantly, but are usually not applicable without extensively rewriting the specification. In this paper, we present a refinement of compositional synthesis that does not require such an intervention. Our algorithm decomposes the system into a sequence of components, such that every component has a strategy that is dominant, i.e., performs at least as good as any possible alternative, provided that the preceding components follow their (already synthesized) strategies. The decomposition of the system is based on a dependency analysis, for which we provide semantic and syntactic techniques. We establish the soundness and completeness of the approach and report on encouraging experimental results.