Synthesis of programs from temporal property specifications

Abstract

The paper investigates a development process for reactive programs, in which the program is automatically generated (synthesized) from a high-level temporal specification. The method is based on previous results that proposed a similar synthesis method for the automatic construction of hardware designs from their temporal specifications. Thus, the work reported here can be viewed as a generalization of existing methods for the synthesis of synchronous reactive systems into the synthesis of asynchronous systems. In the synchronous case it was possible to identify a restricted subclass of formulas and present an algorithm that solves the synthesis problem for these restricted specifications in polynomial time. Here the results are less definitive in the sense that we can offer some heuristics that may provide polynomial-time solutions only in some of the cases.