Coinductive Proof Techniques for Language Equivalence

Language equivalence can be checked coinductively by establishing a bisimulation on suitable deterministic automata. We improve and extend this technique with bisimulation-up-to, which is an enhancement of the bisimulation proof method. First, we focus on the regular operations of union, concatenation and Kleene star, and illustrate our method with new proofs of classical results such as Arden’s rule. Then we extend our enhanced proof method to incorporate language complement and intersection. Finally we define a general format of behavioural differential equations, in which one can define operations on languages for which bisimulation-up-to is a sound proof technique.