The bisimulation proof method: enhancements and open problems

  • Authors:

  • Davide Sangiorgi

  • Affiliations:

  • Università di Bologna, Italy

  • Venue:
  • FMOODS'06 Proceedings of the 8th IFIP WG 6.1 international conference on Formal Methods for Open Object-Based Distributed Systems
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Bisimulation (and, more generally, co-induction) can be regarded as one of the most important contributions of Concurrency Theory to Computer Science. Nowadays, bisimulation and the co-inductive techniques developed from the idea of bisimulation are widely used, not only in Concurrency, but, more broadly, in Computer Science, in a number of areas: functional languages, object-oriented languages, type theory, data types, domains, databases, compiler optimisations, program analysis, verification tools, etc.. For instance, in type theory bisimulation and co-inductive techniques have been used: to prove soundness of type systems; to define the meaning of equality between (recursive) types and then to axiomatise and prove such equalities; to define co-inductive types and manipulate infinite proofs in theorem provers. Also, the development of Final Semantics, an area of Mathematics based on co-algebras and category theory and that gives us a rich and deep perspective on the meaning of co-induction and its duality with induction, has been largely motivated by the interest in bisimulation.