Reachability preservation based parameter synthesis for timed automata

Abstract

The synthesis of timing parameters consists in deriving conditions on the timing constants of a concurrent system such that it meets its specification. Parametric timed automata are a powerful formalism for parameter synthesis, although most problems are undecidable. We first address here the following reachability preservation problem: given a reference parameter valuation and a (bad) control state, do there exist other parameter valuations that reach this control state iff the reference parameter valuation does? We show that this problem is undecidable, and introduce a procedure that outputs a possibly underapproximated answer. We then show that our procedure can efficiently replace the behavioral cartography to partition a bounded parameter subspace into good and bad subparts; furthermore, our procedure can even outperform the classical bad-state driven parameter synthesis semi-algorithm, especially when distributed on a cluster.