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 .

中文翻译：

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接口自动机的线性时间分支时间透视

在过去的二十年中，de Alfaro 和 Henzinger 的接口自动机 (IA) 已成为并发系统基于组件的规范的流行形式框架。IA 的并行组合假设组件可以等待输入但从不等待输出，这意味着必须立即消耗输出或发生通信错误。到目前为止，文献中包含许多 IA 语义：基于跟踪观察通信错误、静止和/或发散的线性时间语义，以及基于交替模拟的分支时间语义。本文从 Rob van Glabbeek 的线性时间分支时间角度调查这些语义，该角度不考虑存在通信错误的设置。我们阐明了 IA 修剪所有可能导致组件自主进入错误状态的行为所隐含的微妙之处，并调查何时需要 de Alfaro 和 Henzinger 对输入确定性的限制。此外，我们为 IA 引入了几个新的语义，特别是线性时间就绪语义和分支时间就绪模拟。