Divergent stutter bisimulation abstraction for controller synthesis with linear temporal logic specifications

Journal article, 2021

This paper proposes a method to synthesise controllers for systems with possibly infinite number of states that satisfy a specification given as an LTL∖∘ formula. A common approach to handle this problem is to first compute a finite-state abstraction of the original state space and then synthesise a controller for the abstraction. This paper proposes to use an abstraction method called divergent stutter bisimulation to abstract the state space of the system. As divergent stutter bisimulation factors out stuttering steps, it typically results in a coarser and therefore smaller abstraction, at the expense of not preserving the temporal “next” operator. The paper leverages results about divergent stutter bisimulation from model checking and shows that divergent stutter bisimulation is a sound and complete abstraction method when synthesising controllers subject to specifications in LTL∖∘.