Overview and Roadmap of Team Automata

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development of team automata over 25+ years, analyzing their synchronization, composition, and relation to other models, while outlining recent research trends and future directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of team automata, compares them with related models, and proposes a research roadmap for future studies.

Findings

Analysis of synchronization and composition in team automata

Comparison with models like Reo, BIP, and Choreography Automata

Identification of recent research trends and open challenges

Abstract

Team Automata is a formalism for interacting component-based systems proposed in 1997, whereby multiple sending and receiving actions from concurrent automata can synchronise. During the past 25+ years, team automata have been studied and applied in many different contexts, involving 25+ researchers and resulting in 25+ publications. In this paper, we first revisit the specific notion of synchronisation and composition of team automata, relating it to other relevant coordination models, such as Reo, BIP, Contract Automata, Choreography Automata, and Multi-Party Session Types. We then identify several aspects that have recently been investigated for team automata and related models. These include communication properties (which are the properties of interest?), realisability (how to decompose a global model into local components?), tool support (what has been automatised or implemented?), and variability (can a family of concrete product (automata) models be captured concisely?). Our presentation of these aspects provides a snapshot of the most recent trends in research on team automata, and delineates a roadmap for future research, both for team automata and for related formalisms.