This paper studies conflicts from a process-algebraic point of view and shows how they are related to the testing theory of fair testing. Conflicts have been introduced in the context of discrete event systems, where two concurrent systems are said to be in conflict if they can get trapped in a situation where they are waiting or running endlessly, forever unable to complete their common task. ...

A notion of central importance in categorical topology is that of topological functor. A faithful functor E → B is called topological if it admits cartesian liftings of all (possibly large) families of arrows; the basic example is the forgetful functor Top→ Set. A topological functor E → 1 is the same thing as a (large) complete preorder, and the general topological functor E → B is intuitively...

In the context of asynchronously communicating and deadlock free services, the refinement relation of services has been formalized by the accordance preorder. A service Impl accords with a service Spec if every controller of Spec—that is, every environment that can interact with service Spec without deadlocking—is a controller of Impl . The procedure to decide accordance of two services uses th...

Given (1) an architecture defined by processes and communication channels between them or with the environment, and (2) a specification on the messages transmitted over the channels, distributed synthesis aims at deciding existence of local programs, one for each process, that together meet the specification, whatever the environment does. Recent work shows that this problem can be solved when ...

This work shows how any classiication system based on orders may be extended to pre-orders. Such systems build hierarchies of object representations with a strict ordering relation between them and do not provide for the retention of multiple logically equivalent representations. In some domains retention of equivalent representations is required-this arises for example when integrating knowled...

We introduce a notion of real-valued reward testing for probabilistic processes by extending the traditional nonnegative-reward testing with negative rewards. In this richer testing framework, the may and must preorders turn out to be inverses. We show that for convergent processes with finitely many states and transitions, but not in the presence of divergence, the real-reward must-testing pre...

Markov decision processes (MDPs) have long been used to model qualitative aspects of systems in the presence of uncertainty. However, much of the literature on MDPs takes a monolithic approach, by modelling a system as a particular MDP; properties of the system are then inferred by analysis of that particular MDP. In this paper we develop compositional methods for reasoning about the qualitativ...

We present an efficient algorithm for computing the partial bisimulation preorder and equivalence for labeled transitions systems. The partial bisimulation preorder lies between simulation and bisimulation, as only a part of the set of actions is bisimulated, whereas the rest of the actions are simulated. Computing quotients for simulation equivalence is more expensive than for bisimulation equ...

Probabilistic nondeterministic processes are commonly modeled as probabilistic LTSs (PLTSs, a.k.a. probabilistic automata). A number of logical characterizations of the main behavioral relations on PLTSs have been studied. In particular, Parma and Segala [2007] define a probabilistic Hennessy-Milner logic interpreted over distributions, whose logical equivalence/preorder when restricted to Dira...

We propose a new approach for minimizing alternating Büchi automata (ABA). The approach is based on the so called mediated equivalence on states of ABA, which is the maximal equivalence contained in the so called mediated preorder. Two states p and q can be related by the mediated preorder if there is a mediator (mediating state) which forward simulates p and backward simulates q. Under some fu...