Formalizing the environment view of process equivalence

Abstract

The notion of program equivalence plays a fundamental role in the understanding of programming related issues in the framework of concurrent/distributive/mobile/global/grid computing. Many observational equivalences have been proposed in the literature. These equivalences are based on the intuition that different classes of environments have different observing powers. The paper provides a formalization of the observations of environments. This formalization leads to an equivalence relation called global bisimulation. We examine this relation in some well known computing models. © Springer-Verlag 2004.