Reactive synthesis is an automated procedure to obtain a correct-by-construction reactive system from its temporal logic specification. Despite significant research progress over the past few decades, reactive synthesis is still in its early stages of practical adoption. One significant barrier to using reactive synthesis outside academia is the long realizability checking and synthesis time of specifications.

This paper introduces a novel, evolution-aware approach for realizability checking. Our approach leverages the key observation that realizability checking is an operation that developers frequently perform during iterative specification development; therefore, utilizing intermediate data from previous realizability checks can substantially improve running times. Our approach computes a local semantic diff between previous and current versions of the specification, and, based on the diff and the previous realizability checking result, applies a set of sound heuristics. These heuristics reuse intermediate data collected during the original specification’s realizability checking to accelerate the evolved specification’s realizability checking. Our evaluation demonstrates that these heuristics are applicable in 70% of cases from a real-world dataset containing thousands of specifications, and that their application significantly improves the running time of realizability checking.