Well-behaved flow event structures for parallel composition and action refinement

Flow event structures were introduced as a model for giving semantics to process algebras. However, it turned out that certain restrictions have to be made to make them suitable for this purpose. In this paper, we investigate subclasses of flow event structures which are both suited for the process algebraic composition operators, and for action refinement as a means of regarding processes on different levels of abstraction. First, suitable subclasses are characterised. Then two specific subclasses are proposed. The larger class generalises the one from Castellani and Zhang (Theoret. Comput. Sci. 179 (1997) 203–215), which is not suitable for action refinement. The smaller one is still sufficiently expressive for dealing with all standard process algebras and action refinement.

Authors

• Rob van Glabbeek
• Ursula Goltz

Keywords

• Concurrency
• Flow event structures
• Parallel composition
• Action refinement