Synthesis of Compact Strategies for Coordination Programs

In multi-agent settings, such as IoT and robotics, it is necessary to coordinate the actions of independent agents in order to achieve a joint behavior. While it is often easy to specify the desired joint behavior, programming the necessary coordination can be difficult. In this work, we develop theory and methods to synthesize coordination strategies that are guaranteed not to initiate unnecessary actions. We refer to such strategies as being “compact.” We formalize the intuitive notion of compactness; show that existing methods do not guarantee compactness; and propose a solution. The solution transforms a given temporal logic specification, using automata-theoretic constructions, to incorporate a notion of minimality. The central result is that the winning strategies for the transformed specification are precisely the compact strategies for the original. One can therefore apply known synthesis methods to produce compact strategies. We report on prototype implementations that synthesize compact strategies for temporal logic specifications and for specifications of multi-robot coordination.