In Search of a Compositional Theory of Self-Stabilization

My literature search for recent work on composing self-stabilizing systems didn't yield anything useful. The layered stabilization idea was already in place by the early 2000s, and nothing fundamental seems to have been added since. Frustrating.So I decided to attack the problem using the concrete example I have. I had composed a rely-guarantee TLA+ model of a retry storm as two components with contracts. That model reproduces metastable failure because the composition that workded from good states failed to work when a large shock removes the base case that let the two conditions hold each other up.Searching for rely-guarantee based composition from every state, turned up a 2017 control theory paper by Kim, Arcak and Seshia, "A Small Gain Theorem for Parametric Assume-Guarantee Contracts". This paper does roughly what I want: discharging circular reasoning between two components without layering or blocking. But it comes with some serious limitations. In their formalism, a component…

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