On Reconfigurable Bisimulation, with an Application to the Distributed Synthesis Problem

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel reconfigurable bisimulation approach for distributing centralized transition systems among asynchronous agents, enabling dynamic communication pruning and efficient distributed synthesis.

Contribution

It proposes Parametric Reconfigurable Bisimulation, allowing agents to dynamically decide event participation, reducing system size and enabling distributed synthesis from global specifications.

Findings

Agents are significantly smaller than the centralized system.

The approach maintains bisimilarity with the original system.

Dynamic pruning bypasses undecidability issues in distributed synthesis.

Abstract

We consider the problem of distributing a centralised transition system to a set of asynchronous agents recognising the same language. Existing solutions are either manual or involve a huge explosion in the number of states from the centralised system. The difficulty arises from the need to keep a rigid communication scheme, specifying a fixed mapping from events to those who can participate in them. Thus, individual agents need to memorise seen events and their order to dynamically compare their knowledge with others when communicating. To bypass this, we rely on reconfigurable communication: agents decide locally ``by-need'' when to participate or discard specific events during execution while not impacting the progress of the joint computation. Our distribution relies on a novel notion of Parametric Reconfigurable Bisimulation, that identifies the only required participations. We show how to compute this bisimulation and that such minimisation produces a joint system that is bisimilar to the original centralised one. We use a case study to show its effectiveness by producing agents that are much smaller than the centralised system and jointly perform the same computations. As a notable application, we use this distribution in order to allow for distributed synthesis from global specifications. In this case, rigid communication leads to undecidability, which is bypassed by our ability to dynamically prune communications.