Distribution of Behaviour into Parallel Communicating Subsystems

Abstract: The process of decomposing a complex system into simpler subsystems has been of interest to computer scientists over many decades, for instance, for the field of distributed computing. In this paper, motivated by the desire to distribute the process of active automata learning onto multiple subsystems, we study the equivalence between a system and the total behaviour of its decomposition which comprises subsystems with communication between them. We show synchronously- and asynchronously-communicating decompositions that maintain branching bisimilarity, and we prove that there is no decomposition operator that maintains divergence-preserving branching bisimilarity over all LTSs.