September 2003
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The dynamics of process calculi, e.g. CCS, have often been defined using a labelled transition system (LTS). More recently it has become common when defining dynamics to use reaction rules ---i.e. unlabelled transition rules--- together with a structural congruence. This form, which I call a reactive system, is highly expressive but is limited in an important way: LTSs lead more naturally to operational equivalences and preorders. This paper shows how to synthesise an LTS for a wide range of reactive systems. A label for an agent (process) `a' is defined to be any context `F' which intuitively is just large enough so that the agent `Fa' (`a' in context `F') is able to perform a reaction step. The key contribution of my work is the precise definition of "just large enough" in terms of the categorical notion of relative pushout (RPO). I then prove that several operational equivalences and preorders (strong bisimulation, weak bisimulation, the traces preorder, and the failures preorder) are congruences when su#cient RPOs exist.