Abstract

The most popular method for establishing bisimilarities among processes is to exhibit bisimulation relations. By definition, R is a bisimulation relation if R progresses to R itself, i.e., pairs of processes in R can match each other's actions and their derivatives are again in R. We study generalisations of the method aimed at reducing the size of the relations to exhibit and hence relieving the proof work needed to establish bisimilarity results. We allow a relation R to progress to a different relation F(R), where F is a function on relations. Functions which can be safely used in this way (i.e., such that if R progresses to F(R), then R only includes pairs of bisimilar processes) are sound. We give a simple condition which ensures soundness. We show that the class of sound functions contains non-trivial functions and we study the closure properties of the class with respect to various important function constructors, like composition, union and iteration. These properties allow us ...

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