‘Closed Interval Process Algebra’ versus ‘Interval Process Algebra’

Summary.

In this paper we extend the theory of processes with durational actions that has been proposed in [1,2] to describe and reason about the performance of systems. We associate basic actions with lower and upper time bounds, that specify their possible different durations. Depending on how the lower and upper time bounds are fixed, eager actions (those which happen as soon as they can), lazy actions (those which can wait arbitrarily long before firing) as well as patient actions (those which can be delayed for a while) can be modelled. Processes are equipped with a (soft) operational semantics which is consistent with the original one and is well-timed (observation traces are ordered with respect to time). The bisimulation-based equivalence defined on top of the new operational semantics, timed equivalence, turns out to be a congruence and, within the lazy fragment of the algebra, refines untimed equivalences. Decidability and automatic checking of timed equivalence are also stated by resorting to a finite alternative characterization which is amenable to an automatic treatment by using standard algorithms. The relationships with other timed calculi and equivalences proposed in the literature are also established.