Communicating Actor Automata - Modelling Erlang Processes as Communicating Machines

Brand and Zafiropulo's notion of Communicating Finite-State Machines (CFSMs) provides a succinct powerful model message-passing concurrency, based around channels. However, major variant concurrency is not readily captured by CFSMs: the actor model. In this work, we define CFSMs, called Actor Automata, to capture as provided Erlang: with mailboxes, from which messages are received according repeated application pattern matching. Furthermore, CFSMs supports dynamic process topologies, capturing common programming idioms in context actor-based concurrency. This gives new basis for modelling, specifying, verifying Erlang programs. We also consider class CAAs that give rise freedom race conditions.