Towards efficient verification of population protocols

Michael Blondin, Javier Esparza, Stefan Jaax, Philipp J. Meyer

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Population protocols are a well established model of computation by anonymous, identical finite state agents. A protocol is well-specified if from every initial configuration, all fair executions of the protocol reach a common consensus. The central verification question for population protocols is the well-specification problem: deciding if a given protocol is well-specified. Esparza et al. have recently shown that this problem is decidable, but with very high complexity: it is at least as hard as the Petri net reachability problem, which is EXPSPACE-hard, and for which only algorithms of non-primitive recursive complexity are currently known. In this paper we introduce the class WS3 of well-specified strongly-silent protocols and we prove that it is suitable for automatic verification. More precisely, we show that WS3 has the same computational power as general well-specified protocols, and captures standard protocols from the literature. Moreover, we show that the membership problem for WS3 reduces to solving boolean combinations of linear constraints over N. This allowed us to develop the first software able to automatically prove well-specification for all of the infinitely many possible inputs.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPODC 2017 - Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages423-430
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781450349925
DOIs
StatePublished - 26 Jul 2017
Event36th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2017 - Washington, United States
Duration: 25 Jul 201727 Jul 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
VolumePart F129314

Conference

Conference36th ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing, PODC 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityWashington
Period25/07/1727/07/17

Keywords

  • Automated verification
  • Population protocols
  • Termination

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