Decoupled Fitness Criteria for Reactive Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new framework for automatically assessing the relative fitness of reactive systems using interpretable, decoupled parameters, and demonstrates its effectiveness through case studies.

Contribution

It presents a novel, general method for assigning comparable fitness scores to reactive systems, reducing the problem to matrix analysis and exploring solution techniques.

Findings

Effective fitness evaluation of reactive systems demonstrated on case studies

Framework provides interpretable and decoupled parameters for fitness assessment

Reduces fitness evaluation to a solvable matrix analysis problem

Abstract

The correctness problem for reactive systems has been thoroughly explored and is well understood. Meanwhile, the efficiency problem for reactive systems has not received the same attention. Indeed, one correct system may be less fit than another correct system and determining this manually is challenging and often done ad hoc. We (1) propose a novel and general framework which automatically assigns comparable fitness scores to reactive systems using interpretable parameters that are decoupled from the system being evaluated, (2) state the computational problem of evaluating this fitness score and reduce this problem to a matrix analysis problem, (3) discuss symbolic and numerical methods for solving this matrix analysis problem, and (4) illustrate our approach by evaluating the fitness of nine systems across three case studies, including the Alternating Bit Protocol and Two Phase Commit.