Abstract

This paper develops a new testing-based semantic theory of processes that aims to circumvent difficulties that traditional testing/failures theories have in dealing with divergent behavior. Our framework incorporates a notion of fairness into the determination of when a process passes a test; we contrast this definition with existing approaches and give characterizations of the induced semantic preorders. An example highlights the utility of our results. 1 Introduction Research into algebraic models of concurrency has focused on the use of semantic equivalences and preorders for establishing that systems meet their specifications. In such an approach to verification one formulates a specification as a system describing the required high-level behavior; a design/implementation then meets such a specification if its behavior is indistinguishable from the specification's (if one is using an equivalence) or if its behavior is in some sense better than the specification's (if one is using...

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