A Fully Abstract Symbolic Semantics for Psi-Calculi

TL;DR

This paper introduces a symbolic transition system for psi-calculi, ensuring full abstraction with respect to bisimulation, facilitating efficient automated analysis while preserving semantic integrity.

Contribution

It develops a fully abstract symbolic semantics for psi-calculi, extending the pi-calculus with nominal data types and logical assertions.

Findings

Symbolic semantics are fully abstract with respect to bisimulation.

The approach enables more efficient automated analysis.

Psi-calculi are more general than other pi-calculus extensions.

Abstract

We present a symbolic transition system and bisimulation equivalence for psi-calculi, and show that it is fully abstract with respect to bisimulation congruence in the non-symbolic semantics. A psi-calculus is an extension of the pi-calculus with nominal data types for data structures and for logical assertions representing facts about data. These can be transmitted between processes and their names can be statically scoped using the standard pi-calculus mechanism to allow for scope migrations. Psi-calculi can be more general than other proposed extensions of the pi-calculus such as the applied pi-calculus, the spi-calculus, the fusion calculus, or the concurrent constraint pi-calculus. Symbolic semantics are necessary for an efficient implementation of the calculus in automated tools exploring state spaces, and the full abstraction property means the semantics of a process does not change from the original.