SMT-Based Synthesis of Distributed Self-Stabilizing Systems

Abstract

A self-stabilizing system is one that guarantees reaching a set of legitimate states from any arbitrary initial state. Designing distributed self-stabilizing protocols is often a complex task and developing their proof of correctness is known to be significantly more tedious. In this article, we propose an SMT-based method that automatically synthesizes a self-stabilizing protocol, given the network topology of distributed processes and description of the set of legitimate states. Our method can synthesize synchronous, asynchronous, symmetric, and asymmetric protocols for two types of stabilization, namely weak and strong . We also report on successful automated synthesis of a set of well-known distributed stabilizing protocols such as Dijkstra’s token ring, distributed maximal matching, graph coloring, and mutual exclusion in anonymous networks.