In: Distributed Computing, Volume 16 Issue 1 (2003), pages 21-35. March 2003.
Abstract: Protocol synthesis is used to derive a protocol specification, that is, the specification of a set of application components running in a distributed system of networked computers, from a specification of services (called the service specification) to be provided by the distributed application to its users. Protocol synthesis reduces design costs and errors by specifying the message exchanges between the application components, as defined by the protocol specification. In general, maintaining such a distributed application involves applying frequent minor modifications to the service specification due to changes in the user requirements. Deriving the protocol specification after each modification using the existing synthesis methods is considered expensive and time consuming. Moreover, we cannot identify what changes we should make to the protocol specification in correspondence to the changes in the service specification. In this paper, we present a new synthesis method to re-synthesize only those parts of the protocol specification that must be modified in order to satisfy the changes in the service specification. The method consists of a set of simple rules that are applied to the protocol specification written in an extended Petri net model. An application example is given along with some experimental results.
Keywords: Distributed system; Service specification; Protocol specification; Protocol synthesis; Protocol re-synthesis; Petri net.