A Decidable Class of Asynchronous Distributed Controllers

We study the problem of synthesizing controllers in a natural distributed asynchronous setting: a finite set of plants interact with their local environments and communicate with each other by synchronizing on common actions. The controller-synthesis problem is to come up with a local strategy for each plant such that the controlled behaviour of the network meets a specification. We consider linear time specifications and provide, in some sense, a minimal set of restrictions under which this problem is effectively solvable: we show that the controller-synthesis problem under these restrictions is decidable while the problem becomes undecidable if any one or more of these three restrictions are dropped.