Compositional Synthesis of Controllers from Scenario-Based Assume-Guarantee Specifications

Modern software-intensive systems often consist of multiple components that interact to fulfill complex functions in sometimes safetycritical situations. During the design, it is crucial to specify the system’s requirements formally and to detect inconsistencies as early as possible in order to avoid flaws in the product or costly iterations during its development. We propose to use Modal Sequence Diagrams (MSDs), a formal, yet intuitive formalism for specifying the interaction of a system with its environment, and developed a formal synthesis approach that allows us to detect inconsistencies and even to automatically synthesize controllers from MSD specifications. The technique is suited for specifications of technical systems with real-time constraints and environment assumptions. However, synthesis is computationally expensive. In order to employ synthesis also for larger specifications, we present, in this paper, a novel assume-guarantee-style compositional synthesis technique for MSD specifications. We provide evaluation results underlining the benefit of our approach and formally justify its correctness.