Design and synthesis of synchronization skeletons using branching time temporal logic

It is shown that it is possible to automatically synthesize the synchronization skeleton of a concurrent program from a Temporal Logic specification and it is believed that this approach may in the long run turn out to be quite practical.

Abstract

We have shown that it is possible to automatically synthesize the synchronization skeleton of a concurrent program from a Temporal Logic specification. We believe that this approach may in the long run turn out to be quite practical. Since synchronization skeletons are, in general, quite small, the potentially exponential behavior of our algorithm need not be an insurmountable obstacle. Much additional research will be needed, however, to make the approach feasible in practice. We have also described a model checking algorithm which can be applied to mechanically verify that a finite state concurrent program meets a particular Temporal Logic specification. We believe that practical software tools based on this technique could be developed in the near future. Indeed, we have already programmed an experimental implementation of the model checker on the DEC 11/70 at Harvard.* Certain applications seem particularly suited to the model checker approach to verification: One example is the problem of verifying the correctness of existing network protocols many of which are coded as finite state machines. We encourage additional work in this area.