Identifying cause and effect relations between events in concurrent event-based components

Concurrent event-based components present characteristics that impose difficulties in understanding their dynamic behavior, mainly for interpreting the cause and effect relations between input and output events in component interactions. In this paper, we propose a technique to help in the process of understanding the dynamic behavior of concurrent event-based components. It checks the event trace (generated by monitoring the component execution) against a specification of the component communication protocol (even with a possibly incomplete or incorrect specification). The technique identifies and presents the more probable cause and effect relations between the component events, providing also a measurement related to this probability.