Modelling Component Behaviour with Concurrent Automata

The effective (re)use of components requires languages for the precise description of observable behaviour, along with methods for checking the compatibility of component interfaces in a design. This is even more challenging in the presence of concurrency. In previous work we have considered a set-based model of components and their composition, in a concurrent setting. In this paper, we present a class of automata, called Σ-automata, in which true-concurrency is treated as an explicit structural property. We show how an automaton can be derived from a component and that every such automaton generates back a component. Apart from determining a usage protocol for the underlying component, this extension to our model provides useful insights on component composition.