Recent Challenges and Ideas in Temporal Synthesis

In automated synthesis, we transform a specification into a system that is guaranteed to satisfy the specification against all environments. While model-checking theory has led to industrial development and use of formal-verification tools, the integration of synthesis in the industry is slow. This has to do with theoretical limitations, like the complexity of the problem, algorithmic limitations, like the need to determinize automata on infinite words and solve parity games, methodological reasons, like the lack of satisfactory compositional synthesis algorithms, and practical reasons: current algorithms produce systems that satisfy the specification, but may do so in a peculiar way and may be larger or less well-structured than systems constructed manually.

The research community has managed to suggest some solutions to these limitations, and bring synthesis algorithms closer to practice. Significant barriers, however, remain. Moreover, the integration of synthesis in real applications has taught us that the traditional setting of synthesis is too simplified and has brought with it new algorithmic challenges. This paper introduces the synthesis problem, algorithms for solving it, and recent promising ideas in making temporal-synthesis useful in practice.