Publisher's Synopsis
Action refinement involves the replacing of an action by a whole process in the description of parallel processes. It is one of the methods proposed to support the formal study of the step-wise development of concurrent systems. In this award-winning thesis Dr Aceto extends the notion of action refinement to the setting of process description languages. The presentation is organised into three parts. The first describes a semantic theory of processes. The core of the book then develops suitable notions of process equivalence for increasingly complex languages with operators for action refinement. In the final part, the author deals with the possibility of using action refinement to 'observe' indirectly the causal relationships among actions in a system. This book contains some important new developments in the understanding of concurrent processes and as such will be of value to all computer scientists researching into the theory of parallel computation.
