Low-Effort Specification Debugging and Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces report-based debugging techniques for reactive system specifications, providing a low-effort, effective way to analyze and identify issues, complement existing high-effort debugging methods like simulation.

Contribution

It presents a novel report-based debugging toolkit for reactive specifications, enhancing practical debugging efficiency in reactive synthesis workflows.

Findings

The toolkit effectively identifies salient specification properties.

It simplifies debugging compared to traditional simulation methods.

Demonstrated usefulness in generalized reactivity(1) synthesis context.

Abstract

Reactive synthesis deals with the automated construction of implementations of reactive systems from their specifications. To make the approach feasible in practice, systems engineers need effective and efficient means of debugging these specifications. In this paper, we provide techniques for report-based specification debugging, wherein salient properties of a specification are analyzed, and the result presented to the user in the form of a report. This provides a low-effort way to debug specifications, complementing high-effort techniques including the simulation of synthesized implementations. We demonstrate the usefulness of our report-based specification debugging toolkit by providing examples in the context of generalized reactivity(1) synthesis.