Translating Asynchronous Games for Distributed Synthesis (Full Version)

TL;DR

This paper establishes a formal connection between control games and Petri games in distributed synthesis, enabling transfer of decidability results and enhancing understanding of asynchronous game models.

Contribution

It provides the first formal translation between control games and Petri games, showing their equivalence and allowing results to be transferred between models.

Findings

Established exponential bounds for game translations.

Proved equivalence of control and Petri games via weak bisimulations.

Enabled transfer of decidability results between game models.

Abstract

In distributed synthesis, we generate a set of process implementations that, together, accomplish an objective against all possible behaviors of the environment. A lot of recent work has focussed on systems with causal memory, i.e., sets of asynchronous processes that exchange their causal histories upon synchronization. Decidability results for this problem have been stated either in terms of control games, which extend Zielonka's asynchronous automata by partitioning the actions into controllable and uncontrollable, or in terms of Petri games, which extend Petri nets by partitioning the tokens into system and environment players. The precise connection between these two models was so far, however, an open question. In this paper, we provide the first formal connection between control games and Petri games. We establish the equivalence of the two game models based on weak bisimulations between their strategies. For both directions, we show that a game of one type can be translated into an equivalent game of the other type. We provide exponential upper and lower bounds for the translations. Our translations make it possible to transfer and combine decidability results between the two types of games. Exemplarily, we translate decidability in acyclic communication architectures, originally obtained for control games, to Petri games, and decidability in single-process systems, originally obtained for Petri games, to control games.