Compatibility is a crucial problem that is encountered while constructing new software by reusing and composing existing components. A set of software components is called compatible if their composition preserves certain properties, such as deadlock freedom. However, checking compatibility for systems communicating asynchronously is an undecidable problem, and asynchronous communication is a common interaction mechanism used in building software systems. A typical approach in analyzing such systems is to bound the state space. In this article, we propose a different approach and do not impose any bounds on the number of participants or the sizes of the message buffers. Instead, we present a sufficient condition for checking compatibility of a set of asynchronously communicating components. Our approach relies on the synchronizability property which identifies systems for which interaction behavior remains the same when asynchronous communication is replaced with synchronous communication. Using the synchronizability property, we can check the compatibility of systems with unbounded message buffers by analyzing only a finite part of their behavior. We have implemented a prototype tool to automate our approach and we have applied it to many examples.

兼容性是在通过重用和组合现有组件来构建新软件时遇到的关键问题。如果一组软件组件的组成保留了某些属性（如死锁自由），则称它们为兼容。但是，检查异步通信系统的兼容性是无法确定的问题，异步通信是在构建软件系统中使用的常见交互机制。分析此类系统的一种典型方法是限制状态空间。在本文中，我们提出了一种不同的方法，并且不对参与者的数量或消息缓冲区的大小施加任何限制。相反，我们提出了一个条件，用于检查一组异步通信组件的兼容性。我们的方法依赖于可同步性属性，该属性标识当异步通信替换为同步通信时，其交互行为保持不变的系统。通过使用syncnizability属性，我们可以通过仅分析系统行为的有限部分来检查具有无限制消息缓冲区的系统的兼容性。我们已经实现了原型工具来自动化我们的方法，并且已经将其应用于许多示例。