Protocol synthesis represents an important alternative to the classical design process based on reachability analysis where the fundamental drawback is the exponential growth of reachable states. In order to demonstrate the usefulness and the feasibility of the protocol synthesis approach presented by Kahlouche and Girardot (see IEEE INFOCOM'1996, p.1165-73, 1996), we have developed a software tool-set for automated protocol synthesis called STEPS which supports our synthesis approach. The aim of this paper is to present the functionalities and an experimentation of STEPS. We also propose a new protocol development methodology based on our synthesis approach.

Automatic synthesis of communication protocols represents an important alternative to the classical analytic approaches based on exhaustive analysis, where the fundamental drawback is the exponential growth of reachable states. We present a new method for synthesizing protocol specifications from service specifications in an interpreted Petri net model. Our approach handles simultaneously: control flow, data flow, distributed choice and data coherency constraints. In other words, we propose a good compromise between the expressiveness power of the service specification model and the synthesis power. An important aspect which characterizes our approach is that the synthesis is based on stepwise refinement rules. This gives it the ability to be an extensible approach.