The semantics of process calculi has traditionally been specified by labelled transition systems (LTS), but with the development of name calculi it turned out that reaction rules (i.e., unlabelled transition rules) are often more natural. This leads to the question of how behavioural equivalences (bisimilarity, trace equivalence, etc.) defined for LTS can be transferred to unlabelled transition systems. Recently, in order to answer this question, several proposals have been made with the aim of automatically deriving an LTS from reaction rules in such a way that the resulting equivalences are congruences. Furthermore these equivalences should agree with the intended semantics, whenever one exists. In this paper we propose saturated semantics, based on a weaker notion of observation and orthogonal to all the previous proposals, and we demonstrate the appropriateness of our semantics by means of two examples: logic programming and a subset of the open π-calculus. Indeed, we prove that our equivalences are congruences and that they coincide with logical equivalence and open bisimilarity respectively, while equivalences studied in previous works are strictly finer.

Abstract. We propose a methodology for the analysis of open systems based on process calculi and bisimilarity. Open systems are seen as coordinators (i.e. terms with place-holders), that evolve when suitable components (i.e. closed terms) fill in their place-holders. The distinguishing feature of our approach is the definition of a symbolic operational semantics for coordinators that exploits spatial/modal formulae as labels of transitions and avoids the universal closure of coordinators w.r.t. all components. Two kinds of bisimilarities are then defined, called strict and large, which differ in the way formulae are compared. Strict bisimilarity implies large bisimilarity which, in turn, implies the one based on universal closure. Moreover, for process calculi in suitable formats, we show how the symbolic semantics can be defined constructively, using unification. Our approach is illustrated on a toy process calculus with ccs-like communication within ambients. 1

h ground and open terms in a uniform way. To this aim, transition labels become pairs, whose components are called triggers (expressing the interaction of a context with its arguments) and effect (representing the behavior offered to the rest of the system, i.e. a possible context). Tiles can be represented as rectangles where the horizontal dimension is devoted to the assembling of states and the vertical dimension is dedicated to the evolution of components. Thus, triggers and effects form the left and right sides of tiles, respectively. The vertices of tiles are called interfaces, connecting the input and output observations to the initial (before the step) and final (after the step) configurations. Thanks to the abstract notions of configuration and observation, tiles allow us to develop a theoretical framework parametric in such structures (e.g. graphs or hypergraphs or trees or l-terms rather than terms), and able to capture analogies in the structures by means of suitable auxili

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Abstract. In the area of component-based software architectures, the term connector has been coined to denote an entity (e.g. the communication network, middleware or infrastructure) that regulate the interaction of independent components. Hence, a rigorous mathematical foundation for connectors is crucial for the study of coordinated systems. In recent years, many different mathematical frameworks have been proposed to specify, design, analyse, compare, prototype and implement connectors rigorously. In this paper, we overview the main features of three notable frameworks and discuss their similarities, differences, mutual embedding and possible enhancements. First, we show that Sobocinski’s nets with boundaries are as expressive as Sifakis et al.’s BI(P), the BIP component framework without priorities. Second, we provide a basic algebra of connectors for BI(P) by exploiting Montanari et al.’s tile model and a recent correspondence result with nets with boundaries. Finally, we exploit the tile model as a unifying framework to compare BI(P) with other models of connectors and to propose suitable enhancements of BI(P). 1