Interaction models describe the exchange of messages between the different components of distributed systems. This paper presents an approach for checking the validity of multi-traces against interaction models. A multi-trace is a collection of traces (sequences of emissions and receptions), each representing a local view of the same global execution of the distributed system. We formally prove our approach, study its complexity, and implement it in a prototype tool.

Interaction languages such as UML sequence diagrams are often associated with a formal semantics by means of translations into formalisms such as automatas or Petri nets. In contrast, we propose an approach without any references to any other behavioral formalisms. We define an operational approach to compute the semantics of interactions. The principle is to identify which elementary communication actions can be immediately executed, and then to compute, for each of those actions, a new interaction representing the possible continuations to its execution. We also define an algorithm for checking the validity of execution traces, i.e. checking whether or not the trace belongs to the semantics of the considered interaction. Algorithms for semantics computation and trace validity are analyzed by means of some experiments.

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