Compositional Failure-based Equivalence of Constraint Automata

Reo is a coordination language for modeling component connectors of component-based computing systems. Constraint automaton, as an extension of finite automaton, has been proposed as the operational semantics of Reo. In this paper, we introduce an extended definition of constraint automaton by which, every constraint automaton can be considered as a labeled transition system and each labeled transition system can be translated into a constraint automaton. We show that failure-based equivalences CFFD and NDFD are congruences with respect to composition of constraint automata using their join (production) and hiding operators. Based on these congruency results and by considering the temporal logic preservation properties of CFFD and NDFD equivalences, they can be used for reducing sizes of models before doing model checking based verification.