Imposing certain restrictions on the transition system that defines the behaviour of a process allows us to characterize the readiness semantics of [OH86] by means of black–box testing experiments, or more precisely by lighted button testing experiments [BM92]. As divergence is considered we give the semantics as a preorder, the readiness preorder, which kernel coincides with the readiness equi...

We present a theoretical framework which allows to define in a uniform way coinductive characterisations of nearly any semantic preorder or equivalence between processes, by means of simulations up-to and bisimulations up-to. In particular, all the semantics in the linear time-branching time spectrum are covered. Constrained simulations, that generalise plain simulations by including a constrai...

I this paper, we investigate the integrated information and pricing strategy for a seller who can take customer preorders before the release of a product. The preorder option enables the seller to sell a product at an early stage when consumers are less certain about their valuations. We find that the optimal pricing strategy may be highly dependent on the amount of information available at pre...

Abs t rac t . Two different formalisms for concurrency are compared and are shown to have common foundations. The Input/Output automaton model and the theory of testing are analyzed in the framework of transition systems. The relationship between the fair and quiescent preorders of I/O automata is investigated and the two preorders are shown to coincide on a large class of automata. I/O automat...

Two diierent formalisms for concurrency are compared and are shown to have common foundations. The Input/Output automaton model and the theory of testing are analyzed in the framework of transition systems. The relationship between the fair and quiescent preorders of I/O automata is investigated and the two preorders are shown to coincide on a large class of automata. I/O automata are encoded i...

This paper presents a testing-based semantic preorder for reasoning about the predictability of realtime systems specified using the process description language TPL. The predictability of the systems is measured in terms of the amount of variability present in their “activity-completion times”. The semantic preorder is shown to coincide with an already existing, well-investigated implementatio...

We propose a new approach for automatic verification of programs with dynamic heap manipulation. The method is based on symbolic (backward) reachability analysis using upward-closed sets of heaps w.r.t. an appropriate preorder on graphs. These sets are represented by a finite set of minimal graph patterns corresponding to a set of bad configurations. We define an abstract semantics for the prog...

We present a simulation preorder for reactive systems modeled by fair Kripke structures whose transition relation is divided into two parts, internal and external. The first one models the internal behaviour of the system, while the second one is used to model the interaction with an environment. We show that our simulation preorder preserves a substantial subset of ∀CTL∗. Then, we present an a...

Consider the following curious puzzle: call an n-tuple X = (X1, . . . , Xn) of sets smaller than another ntuple Y if it has fewer unordered sections. We show that equivalence classes for this preorder are very easy to describe and characterize the preorder in terms of the simpler pointwise inclusion and the existence of a special increasing boolean operator f : B → B. We also show that contrary...