NDLI: Reaching and Distinguishing States of Distributed Systems

Content Provider	Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)
Author	Hierons, Robert M.
Copyright Year	2010
Abstract	Some systems interact with their environment at physically distributed interfaces, called ports, and in testing such a system it is normal to place a tester at each port. Each tester observes only the events at its port and it is known that this limited observational power introduces additional controllability and observability problems into testing. Given a multiport finite state machine (FSM) M, we consider the problems of defining strategies for the testers either to reach a given state of M or to distinguish two states of M. These are important problems since most techniques for testing from a single-port FSM use sequences that reach and distinguish states. Both problems can be solved in low-order polynomial time for single-port FSMs but we prove that the corresponding decision problems are undecidable for multiport FSMs. However, we also show that they can be solved in low-order polynomial times for deterministic FSMs if we restrict our attention to controllable tests. These results have important ramifications for testing from a multiport FSM since they suggest that methods for testing from a single-port FSM cannot be easily adapted. In addition, two FSMs can be distinguished if and only if their initial states can be distinguished and so the results suggest that, in contrast to single-port FSMs, we cannot expect to produce general complete test generation methods for multiport FSMs.
Starting Page	3480
Ending Page	3500
Page Count	21
File Format	PDF
ISSN	00975397
DOI	10.1137/090771296
e-ISSN	10957111
Journal	SIAM Journal on Computing (SMJCAT)
Issue Number	8
Volume Number	39
Language	English
Publisher	Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Publisher Date	2010-08-19
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Computational difficulty of problems Specification and verification multiport systems testing Formal languages and automata distributed systems Models and methods for concurrent and distributed computing Mathematical aspects of software engineering finite state machine
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Mathematics Computer Science

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