Synthesis from LTL Specifications with Mean-Payoff Objectives

TL;DR

This paper extends classical LTL synthesis to a quantitative setting with mean-payoff objectives, providing complexity results, strategies, and an efficient antichain-based algorithm with promising experimental validation.

Contribution

It introduces LTLMP synthesis, proving its complexity, and develops a Safraless, antichain-based algorithm for finite-memory strategies with experimental results.

Findings

LTLMP realizability is 2ExpTime-Complete.

Finite-memory epsilon-optimal strategies exist for LTLMP.

Antichain-based procedures efficiently solve safety games.

Abstract

The classical LTL synthesis problem is purely qualitative: the given LTL specification is realized or not by a reactive system. LTL is not expressive enough to formalize the correctness of reactive systems with respect to some quantitative aspects. This paper extends the qualitative LTL synthesis setting to a quantitative setting. The alphabet of actions is extended with a weight function ranging over the rational numbers. The value of an infinite word is the mean-payoff of the weights of its letters. The synthesis problem then amounts to automatically construct (if possible) a reactive system whose executions all satisfy a given LTL formula and have mean-payoff values greater than or equal to some given threshold. The latter problem is called LTLMP synthesis and the LTLMP realizability problem asks to check whether such a system exists. We first show that LTLMP realizability is not more difficult than LTL realizability: it is 2ExpTime-Complete. This is done by reduction to two-player mean-payoff parity games. While infinite memory strategies are required to realize LTLMP specifications in general, we show that epsilon-optimality can be obtained with finite memory strategies, for any epsilon > 0. To obtain an efficient algorithm in practice, we define a Safraless procedure to decide whether there exists a finite-memory strategy that realizes a given specification for some given threshold. This procedure is based on a reduction to two-player energy safety games which are in turn reduced to safety games. Finally, we show that those safety games can be solved efficiently by exploiting the structure of their state spaces and by using antichains as a symbolic data-structure. All our results extend to multi-dimensional weights. We have implemented an antichain-based procedure and we report on some promising experimental results.