Using Controller-Synthesis Techniques to Build Property-Enforcing Layers

In complex systems, like robot plants, applications are built on top of a set of components, or devices. Each of them has particular individual constraints, and there are also logical constraints on their interactions, related to e.g., mechanical characteristics or access to shared resources. Managing these constraints may be separated from the application, and performed by an intermediate layer.We show how to build such property-enforcing layers, in a mixed imperative/declarative style: 1) the constraints intrinsic to one component are modeled by an automaton; the product of these automata is a first approximation of the set of constraints that should be respected; 2) the constraints that involve several components are expressed as temporal logic properties of this product; 3) we use general controller synthesis techniques and tools in order to combine the set of communicating parallel automata with the global constraint.