Refinement of Components in Connection-Safe Assemblies with Synchronous and Asynchronous Communication

Abstract

AbstractComponents are strongly encapsulated behaviours which interact with the environment by exchanging messages. Interaction may, amongst others, follow a synchronous rendezvous mechanism for message exchange or an asynchronous paradigm where sending and handling a message happens at different points in time. We extend our previously defined component model by integrating synchronous and asynchronous communication. As the formal background we use I/O-transition systems and consider asynchronous communication with fifo-ordered message buffers. We identify compatibility properties that should be satisfied when components communicate along synchronous and asynchronous connectors. As a first result we show that synchronous compatibility is a sufficient condition to ensure buffered compatibility in asynchronous communications. We introduce the notion of connection-safe assemblies which requires compatibility of both kinds of communication. We define a refinement relation and show its compositionality with respect to synchronous and asynchronous connectors in connection-safe assemblies. Finally, we provide results showing the preservation of connection-safety under component refinement.KeywordsCommunication BehaviourAssembly BehaviourObservable BehaviourComposite ComponentSimple ComponentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.