Composing Communicating Systems, Synchronously

Abstract

Communicating systems are nowadays part of everyday life, yet programming and analysing them is difficult. One of the many reasons for this difficulty is their size, hence compositional approaches are a need. We discuss how to ensure relevant communication properties such as deadlock freedom in a compositional way. The idea is that communicating systems can be composed by taking two of their participants and transforming them into coupled forwarders connecting the two systems. It has been shown that, for asynchronous communications, if the participants are “compatible” then composition satisfies relevant communication properties provided that the single systems satisfy them. We show that such a result changes considerably for synchronous communications. We also discuss a different form of composition, where a unique forwarder is used.