Automated Synthesis of Distributed Self-Stabilizing Protocols

In this paper, we introduce an SMT-based method that automatically synthesizes a distributed self-stabilizing protocol from a given high-level specification and network topology. Unlike existing approaches, where synthesis algorithms require the explicit description of the set of legitimate states, our technique only needs the temporal behavior of the protocol. We extend our approach to synthesize ideal-stabilizing protocols, where every state is legitimate. We also extend our technique to synthesize monotonic-stabilizing protocols, where during recovery, each process can execute an action at most once. Our proposed methods are fully implemented and we report successful synthesis of well-known protocols such as Dijkstra’s token ring and a self-stabilizing version of Raymond’s mutual exclusion algorithm, ideal-stabilizing leader election and local mutual exclusion, as well as monotonic-stabilizing maximal independent set and distributed Grundy coloring.