Channel system (computer science) (original) (raw)

In computer science, a channel system is a finite state machine similar to communicating finite-state machine in which there is a single system communicating with itself instead of many systems communicating with each other. A channel system is similar to a pushdown automaton where a queue is used instead of a stack. Those queues are called channels. Intuitively, each channel represents a sequence a message to be sent, and to be read in the order in which they are sent.