TY - CONF AB - The simulation preorder on state transition systems is widely accepted as a useful notion of refinement, both in its own right and as an efficiently checkable sufficient condition for trace containment. For composite systems, due to the exponential explosion of the state space, there is a need for decomposing a simulation check of the form P< s Q into simpler simulation checks on the components of P and Q. We present an assume-guarantee rule that enables such a decomposition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first assume-guarantee rule that applies to a refinement relation different from trace containment. Our rule is circular, and its soundness proof requires induction on trace trees. The proof is constructive: given simulation relations that witness the simulation preorder between corresponding components of P and Q, we provide a procedure for constructing a witness relation for P< s Q. We also extend our assume-guarantee rule to account for fairness assumptions on transition systems AU - Henzinger, Thomas A AU - Qadeer, Shaz AU - Rajamani, Sriram AU - Tasiran, Serdar ID - 4486 SN - 9783540651918 T2 - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design TI - An assume-guarantee rule for checking simulation VL - 1522 ER -