Refinement of Interface Automata Strengthened by Action Semantics

Interface automata are light-weight models that capture the temporal interface behavior of software components. They have the ability to model both the input requirements and the output behavior of a component. They support the compatibility check between interface models to ensure a correct interaction between components and they adopt an alternating simulation approach to design refinement. In this paper, we extend our previous works on checking interface automata interoperability by adapting their alternating refinement relation to the action semantics. We show the relation between pre and post-conditions of transitions in the abstract version of an interface and their corresponding ones in its concrete version. We illustrate our extensions by a case study of the CyCab car component-based system.