Testing equivalence vs. Runtime monitoring

Abstract

Rocco De Nicola’s most cited paper, which was coauthored with his PhD supervisor Matthew Hennessy, introduced three seminal testing equivalences over processes represented as states in labelled transition systems. This article relates those classic process semantics with the framework for runtime monitoring developed by the authors in the context of the project ‘TheoFoMon: Theoretical Foundations for Monitorability’. It shows that may-testing semantics is closely related to the basic monitoring set-up within that framework, whereas, over strongly-convergent processes, must-testing semantics is induced by a collection of monitors that can detect when processes are unable to perform certain actions.