Advances in parameterized verification of population protocols

Abstract

Population protocols (Angluin et al. PODC, 2004) are a for-mal model of sensor networks consisting of identical mobile devices. Two devices can interact and thereby change their states. Computations are infinite sequences of interactions satisfying a strong fairness constraint. A population protocol is well specified if for every initial configuration C of devices, and every computation starting at C, all devices eventually agree on a consensus value depending only on C. If a protocol is well specified, then it is said to compute the predicate that assigns to each initial configuration its consensus value. While the computational power of well-specified protocols has been extensively studied, much less is known about how to verify their correct-ness: Given a population protocol, is it well specified? Given a population protocol and a predicate, does the protocol compute the predicate? Given a well-specified protocol, can we automatically obtain a symbolic repre-sentation of the predicate it computes? We survey our recent work on this problem.