Syntactic formats for free: An abstract approach to process equivalence

Abstract

A framework of Plotkin and Turi's, originally aimed at providing an abstract notion of bisimulation, is modified to cover other operational equivalences and preorders. Combined with bialgebraic methods, it yields a technique for the derivation of syntactic formats for transition system specifications which guarantee operational preorders to be precongruences. The technique is applied to the trace preorder, the completed trace preorder and the failures preorder. In the latter two cases, new syntactic formats ensuring precongruence properties are introduced. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.