Simulation relations for systems with distributed interfaces

In this paper we define simulation relations for distributed systems. Taking as starting point our previous work on the distributed testing architecture, we introduce novel simulation relations that can be used to define, given a specification, what a good implementation is. We approach the problem from two different perspectives. First, we consider that different ports of the system cannot share information. Thus, the decision to consider whether a system is correct has to be based only on local observations. We give some examples to show that this relation is very weak and propose a new one where we allow the different ports to partially communicate. Specifically, we do not implement a complex synchronization mechanism but allow entities to combine whole traces to obtain a verdict.