Distributed bisimulations

Abstract

A new equivalence between concurrent processes is proposed. It generalizes the well-known bisimulation equivalence to take into account the distributed nature of processes. The result is a noninterleaving semantic theory; concurrent processes are differentiated from processes that are non-deterministic but sequential. The new equivalence, together with its observational version, is investigated for a subset of the language CCS, and various algebraic characterizations are obtained.