On the expressiveness and decidability of higher-order process calculi

  • Authors:
  • Ivan Lanese;Jorge A. Pérez;Davide Sangiorgi;Alan Schmitt

  • Affiliations:
  • Focus Team, Università di Bologna/INRIA, Italy;CITI -- Department of Computer Science, FCT New University of Lisbon, Portugal;Focus Team, Università di Bologna/INRIA, Italy;Sardes Project-Team, INRIA Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes, France

  • Venue:
  • Information and Computation
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

In higher-order process calculi, the values exchanged in communications may contain processes. A core calculus of higher-order concurrency is studied; it has only the operators necessary to express higher-order communications: input prefix, process output, and parallel composition. By exhibiting a deterministic encoding of Minsky machines, the calculus is shown to be Turing complete. Therefore its termination problem is undecidable. Strong bisimilarity, however, is shown to be decidable. Furthermore, the main forms of strong bisimilarity for higher-order processes (higher-order bisimilarity, context bisimilarity, normal bisimilarity, barbed congruence) coincide. They also coincide with their asynchronous versions. A sound and complete axiomatization of bisimilarity is given. Finally, bisimilarity is shown to become undecidable if at least four static (i.e., top-level) restrictions are added to the calculus.