Implementation Relations for the Distributed Test Architecture

Some systems interact with their environment at a number of physically distributed interfaces called ports. When testing such a system under test (SUT) it is normal to place a local tester at each port and the local testers form a local test case. If the local testers cannot interact with one another and there is no global clock then we are testing in the distributed test architecture. In this paper we explore the effect of the distributed test architecture when testing an SUT against an input output transition system, adapting the ioco implementation relation to this situation. In addition, we define what it means for a local test case to be deterministic, showing that we cannot always implement a deterministic global test case as a deterministic local test case. Finally, we show how a global test case can be mapped to a local test case.