Unreliability in Practical Subclasses of Communicating Systems

Systems of communicating automata are prominent models for peer-to-peer message-passing over unbounded channels, but in the general scenario, most verification properties are undecidable. To address this issue, two decidable subclasses, Realisable with Synchronous Communication (RSC) and k-Multiparty Compatibility (k-MC), were proposed in the literature, with corresponding verification tools developed and applied in practice. Unfortunately, both RSC and k-MC are not resilient under failures: (1) their decidability relies on the assumption of perfect channels and (2) most standard protocols do not satisfy RSC or k-MC under failures. To address these limitations, this paper studies the resilience of RSC and k-MC under two distinct failure models: interference and crash-stop failures. For interference, we relax the conditions of RSC and k-MC and prove that the inclusions of these relaxed properties remain decidable under interference, preserving their known complexity bounds. We then propose a novel crash-handling communicating system that captures wider behaviours than existing multiparty session types (MPST) with crash-stop failures. We study a translation of MPST with crash-stop failures into this system integrating RSC and k-MC properties, and establish their decidability results. Finally, by verifying representative protocols from the literature using RSC and k-MC tools extended to interferences, we evaluate the relaxed systems and demonstrate their resilience.