State space reduction techniques for component interfaces

Automata-based interface and protocol specifications provide an elegant framework to capture and automatically verify the interactive behavior of component-based software systems. Unfortunately, the underlying formalisms suffer from combinatorial state explosion when constructing new specifications for composite components or systems and may therefore render the application of these techniques impractical for real-world applications. In this paper, we explore the bisimulation technique as a means for a mechanical state space reduction of component-based systems. In particular, we apply both strong and weak bisimulation to Component Interaction Automata in order to obtain a minimal automata that can serve as a behavioral equivalent abstraction for a given component specification and illustrate that the proposed approach can significantly reduce the complexity of an interface specification after composition. © 2008 Springer.