Timed Testing of Concurrent Systems

Abstract

This paper is concerned with timing considerations for concurrent systems where the time needed by the individual actions is not known beforehand: it has long been suspected that the power of partial order semantics is needed here. We develop a suitable testing scenario to study this idea. With one view of timed behaviour, we can confirm that interval semiword semantics, a special partial order semantics, is indeed what can be observed with timed tests. With another view, our testing scenario leads to timed-refusal-trace semantics; this is a noninterleaving semantics, but it seems that it cannot be represented with partial orders in a meaningful way.