From enhanced coinduction towards enhanced induction

Abstract

There exist a rich and well-developed theory of enhancements of the coinduction proof method, widely used on behavioural relations such as bisimilarity. We study how to develop an analogous theory for inductive behaviour relations, i.e., relations defined from inductive observables. Similarly to the coinductive setting, our theory makes use of (semi)-progressions of the form R->F(R), where R is a relation on processes and F is a function on relations, meaning that there is an appropriate match on the transitions that the processes in R can perform in which the process derivatives are in F(R). For a given preorder, an enhancement corresponds to a sound function, i.e., one for which R->F(R) implies that R is contained in the preorder; and similarly for equivalences. We introduce weights on the observables of an inductive relation, and a weight-preserving condition on functions that guarantees soundness. We show that the class of functions contains non-trivial functions and enjoys closure properties with respect to desirable function constructors, so to be able to derive sophisticated sound functions (and hence sophisticated proof techniques) from simpler ones. We consider both strong semantics (in which all actions are treated equally) and weak semantics (in which one abstracts from internal transitions). We test our enhancements on a few non-trivial examples.