Synthesis of concurrent systems for an atomic read/atomic write model of computation

Abstract

Methods for mechanically synthesizing concurrent programs from temporal logic specifications have been proposed (cf. [EC82, MW84, PR89, PR89b, AM94]). An important advantage of these synthesis methods is that they obviate the need to manually construct a program and compose a proof of its correctness. A serious drawback of these methods in practice, however, is that they produce concurrent programs for models of computation that are often unrealistic, involving highly centralized system architecture (cf. [MW84]) or processes with global information about the system state (cf. [EC82]). Even simple synchronization protocols based on atomic read / atomic write primitives such as Peterson's solution to the mutual exclusion problem have remained outside the scope of practical mechanical synthesis methods. In this paper, we show how to mechanically synthesize in more realistic computational models solutions to synchronization problems. We illustrate the method by synthesizing Peterson's solution to the mutual exclusion problem.