Finite State Automata for Topological Sorting

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Description/Abstract

A specification of concurrent communicating processes represents a causal relationship of the events contained in the specification. It is very simple to model this as a finite partial order over the set of events when the specification contains no iteration (e.g. for an MSC with no loop constructs). When there is iteration it is far more complex to express the causal relationships between the events within a mathematical setting. This paper first explores, in section 2, how to describe all total extensions of a partial order as a finite state automaton (FSA). These total extensions represent the test scripts for a specification when there is no iteration. Then, in section 3 we extend these ideas to specifications which contain complex iterations. For MSC this means the inline loop construct. Section 3.2 describes the algorithm for characterising an iterative specification as a FSA.