Modelling Asynchrony with a Synchronous Model

Abstract

The I/O automaton paradigm of Lynch and Tuttle models asynchrony through an interleaving parallel composition. The recognition that such interleaving models in fact can be viewed as special cases of synchronous parallel composition has been very limited. Let $\mathcal{A}$ be any set of finite-state I/O automata drawing actions from a fixed finite set containing a subset Δ. In this article we establish a translation T : $\mathcal{A} \to \mathcal{P}$ to a class of ω-automata $\mathcal{P}$ closed under a synchronous parallel composition, for which T is monotonic with respect to implementation relative to Δ, and linear with respect to composition. Thus, for A¹, ..., A, B¹, ..., B ∈ $\mathcal{A}$ and A = A¹ ‖...‖ A, B = B¹ ‖...‖ B, if Δ is the set of actions common to both A and B, then A implements B (in the sense of I/O automata) if and only if the ω-automaton language containment$\mathcal{L}$ (T(A¹) ⊗ ... ⊗ T(A)) ⊂ $\mathcal{L}$ (T(B¹) ⊗ ... ⊗ T(B)) obtains, where ‖ denotes the interleaving parallel composition on $\mathcal{A}$ and ⊗ denotes the synchronous parallel composition on $\mathcal{P}$ . For the class $\mathcal{P}$, we use the L-process model of ω-automata. This result enables one to verify systems specified by I/O automata through model-checkers such as COSPAN or SMV, that operate on models with synchronous parallel composition. The translation technique generalizes to other interleaving models, although in each case, the translation map must match the specific model.