Section: New Results

Behavioural Semantics if Open pNets

Participants : Eric Madelaine, Ludovic Henrio, Siqi Li, Min Zhang.

We have extended our preliminary work on Parameterised Networks of Automata (pNets), by looking at the behavioural semantics and at bisimulation equivalences for open pNet systems. These can be used to encode operators of various process algebras, construct of distributed or reactive system programming languages, or even parallel algorithmic skeletons, and generic distributed algorithms. As a first step, we studied the properties of a strong bisimulation equivalence based on logical hypotheses about the behaviour of process variables in the open systems. This has been published in [22], [33] and an extended version as an Inria research report [43]. We are now implementing algorithms for computing the symbolic behavioural semantics of open pNets, and checking strong bisimulation, using a SAT engine for reasoning on the hypotheses.

In order to understand better this behavioural semantics, we also have defined another version with a denotational flavour, namely using a “Universal Theory of Processes (UTP)” style. There we express the communication actions of pNets using traces of interaction events, and we were able to prove axiomatic properties of some simple (open) pNets. This was published in [32]. In the long term, it could be interesting to study the relations between the FH-bisimulation and the UTP semantics, relating both behavioural, denotational and algebraic semantics of pNets.