Process Algebra, CCS, and Bisimulation Decidability

Over the past fifteen years, there has been intensive study of formal systems that can model concurrency and communication. Two such systems are the Calculus of Communicating Systems, and the Algebra of Communicating Processes. The objective of this paper has two aspects; (1) to study the characteristics and features of these two systems, and (2) to investigate two interesting formal proofs concerning issues of decidability of bisimulation equivalence in these systems. An examination of the processes that generate context-free languages as a trace set shows that their bisimulation equivalence is decidable, in contrast to the undecidability of their trace set equivalence. Recent results have also shown that the bisimulation equivalence problem for processes with a limited amount of concurrency is decidable. Comments University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research in Cognitive Science Technical Report No. IRCS-94-06. This technical report is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/ircs_reports/152