Explainable Reactive Synthesis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new approach to reactive synthesis that generates explanations for the synthesized implementation by incrementally adding properties and repairing the implementation with counterexample traces, enhancing understandability.

Contribution

It proposes SAT-based algorithms for incremental synthesis, repair, and explanation generation, improving the interpretability of reactive system implementations.

Findings

Algorithms successfully generate explanations for synthesized systems.

Evaluation on SYNTCOMP benchmarks demonstrates effectiveness.

Incremental approach aids user understanding of complex specifications.

Abstract

Reactive synthesis transforms a specification of a reactive system, given in a temporal logic, into an implementation. The main advantage of synthesis is that it is automatic. The main disadvantage is that the implementation is usually very difficult to understand. In this paper, we present a new synthesis process that explains the synthesized implementation to the user. The process starts with a simple version of the specification and a corresponding simple implementation. Then, desired properties are added one by one, and the corresponding transformations, repairing the implementation, are explained in terms of counterexample traces. We present SAT-based algorithms for the synthesis of repairs and explanations. The algorithms are evaluated on a range of examples including benchmarks taken from the SYNTCOMP competition.