Communicating with Synchronized Environments

In the modern design environments, different modules, available in existent libraries, may obey different architectural styles and execution models. Reaching a well-behaved composition of such modules is a very important task of the system designer. In the framework of the action systems formalism, we analyze the co-existence of two models of execution, one synchronized, the other, interleaved. We devise a communication scheme, similar to the classical paradigm of polling, which allows us to model synchronized components that correctly exchange information, within the borders of a global system, with their non-synchronized partners. Derivations of such mechanisms follow specific correctness rules for refinement. We illustrate our methods on an audio system example, implementable as either a software or a hardware device