A Calculus for Team Automata

Team automata are a formalism for the component-based specification of reactive, distributed systems. Their main feature is a flexible technique for specifying coordination patterns among systems, thus extending I/O automata. Furthermore, for some patterns the language recognized by a team automaton can be specified via those languages recognized by its components. We introduce a process calculus tailored over team automata. Each automaton is described by a process, such that its associated (fragment of a) labeled transition system is bisimilar to the original automaton. The mapping is moreover denotational, since the operators defined on processes are in a bijective correspondence with a chosen family of coordination patterns and that correspondence is preserved by the mapping. We thus extend to team automata a few classical results on I/O automata and their representation by process calculi. Moreover, besides providing a language for expressing team automata, we widen the family of coordination patterns for which an equational characterization of the language associated to a composite automaton can be provided. The latter result is obtained by providing a set of axioms, in ACP-style, for capturing bisimilarity in our calculus.