Trace automaton: an approach to generating partial-order traces

The trace automaton appears to be a useful tool in generating partially-ordered test cases for asynchronous systems. We give an EXPSPACE algorithm which constructs the trace automaton from a given set of asynchronous communicating processes. Conclusions: We introduce the notion of trace automaton of a system of asyn-chronously communicating input-output state machines such that the trace automaton can be used to derive partially-ordered traces of the system in a straightforward manner. We also give an algorithm for the construction of the trace automaton. The derivation of the traces can be woven into the trace automaton construction, thus enabling the generation of traces " on-the-fly " without constructing the entire trace automaton a-priori. The trace automaton, thus, seems to be useful tool for the generation of the test suites for asynchronous systems. However the algorithm suffers from the state explosion problem. Consequently, in the the worst case, it will take exponential space to generate the entire trace automaton.