Interleaving & Reconfigurable Interaction: Separating Choice from Scheduling using Glue

Abstract: Reconfigurable interaction induces another dimension of nondeterminism in concurrent systems which makes it hard to reason about the different choices of the system from a global perspective. Namely, (1) choices that correspond to concurrent execution of independent events; and (2) forced interleaving (or scheduling) due to reconfiguration. Unlike linear order semantics of computations, partial order semantics recovers information about the interdependence among the different events for fixed interaction, but still is unable to handle reconfiguration. We introduce glued partial orders as a way to capture reconfiguration. Much like partial orders capture all possible choices for fixed systems, glued partial orders capture all possible choices alongside reconfiguration. We show that a glued partial order is sufficient to correctly capture all partial order computations that differ in forced interleaving due to reconfiguration. Furthermore, we show that computations belonging to different glued partial orders are only different due to non-determinism.