A Variety of Request-Response Specifications

Abstract

We find, motivated by real-world applications, that the well-known request-response specification comes with multiple variations, and that these variations should be distinguished. As the first main contribution, we introduce a classification of those variations into six types, and present it as a decision tree, where a user is led to the type that is suited for their application by answering a couple of questions. Our second main contribution is the formalization of those six types in various formalisms such as temporal logics, grammars, and automata; here, two types out of the six are non-regular specifications and their formalization requires extended formalisms. We also survey tools for monitoring these specifications to cater for practitioners' needs.