A linear-time branching-time perspective on interface automata

Over the past two decades, de Alfaro and Henzinger’s interface automata (IA) have become a popular formal framework for the component-based specification of concurrent systems. IA’s parallel composition assumes that a component may wait on inputs but never on outputs, implying that an output must be consumed immediately or a communication error occurs. By now, the literature contains a number of semantics for IA: linear-time semantics based on traces observing communication errors, quiescence and/or divergence, as well as branching-time semantics based on alternating simulation. This article surveys these semantics from Rob van Glabbeek’s linear-time branching-time perspective, which does not consider settings with communication errors. We shed light onto the subtleties implied by IA’s pruning of all behaviour that might lead a component to autonomously enter an error state, and investigate when exactly de Alfaro and Henzinger’s restriction of input-determinism is needed. In addition, we introduce several new semantics for IA, in particular the linear-time ready semantics and the branching-time ready simulation.