Team Automata@Work: On Safe Communication

We study requirements for safe communication in systems of reactive components in which components communicate via synchronised execution of common actions. These systems are modelled in the framework of team automata in which any number of components can participate—as a sender or as a receiver—in the execution of a communication action. Moreover, there is no fixed synchronisation policy as these policies in general depend on the application. In this short paper, we reconsider the concept of safe communication in terms of reception and responsiveness requirements, originally defined for synchronisation policies determined by a synchronisation type. Illustrated by a motivating example, we propose three extensions. First, compliance, i.e. satisfaction of communication requirements, does not have to be immediate. Second, the synchronisation type (and hence the communication requirements) no longer has to be uniform, but can be specified per action. Third, we introduce final states to be able to distinguish between possible and guaranteed executions of actions.