Nancy Lynch and Mark Tuttle. An Introduction to Input/Output automata. CWI-Quarterly, 2(3):219--246, September 1989. Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. .pdf Also, Technical Memo MIT/LCS/TM-373, Laboratory for Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. .pdf

Summary

The input/output automaton model is a tool for modeling components in asynchronous concurrent systems. Since its introduction, the model has been used for describing and reasoning about many different types of systems, including network resource allocation algorithms, communication algorithms, concurrent database systems, shared atomic objects, and dataflow architectures.

This paper is intended to introduce researchers to the model. It contains an overview of its definitions, several illustrative examples involving candy vending machines and leader election, and a brief survey of some of the uses that have so far been made of the model.