Synthesis of event-based controllers for software engineering

Behavioural modelling has been widely used to aid in the design of concurrent systems. Behaviour models have shown to be useful to uncover design errors in early stages of the development process. However, building correct behaviour models is costly and requires significant experience. Controller synthesis offers a way to build models that are correct by construction. Existing software engineering techniques for synthesising controllers have various limitations. Such limitations can be seen as restrictions in the expressiveness of the controller goals and environment model, or in the relation between the controllable and monitored actions. The main aim of this thesis is the development of novel techniques overcoming known limitations of previous approaches and methodological guidelines for synthesising useful controllers. This thesis establishes the framework for controller synthesis techniques that support event-based models, expressive goal specifications, distinguish controllable from monitored actions and guarantee achievement of the desired goals. Together with these techniques, methodological guidelines are proposed to help in building more accurate descriptions of the environment and more effective controllers. In addition, this thesis presents a tool that implements the proposed techniques. Evaluation of the techniques has been conducted using the tool to model known case studies from the literature, showing that by allowing more expressive controller goals and environment models, and explicitly distinguishing controllable and monitored actions such case studies can be more accurately modelled and solutions guaranteeing satisfaction of the goals can be achieved.