Partition Refinement for Bisimilarity in CCP [ Extended Version ]

Saraswat’s concurrent constraint programming (ccp) is a mature formalism for modeling processes (or programs) that interact by telling and asking constraints in a global medium, called the store. Bisimilarity is a standard behavioural equivalence in concurrency theory, but a well-behaved notion of bisimilarity for ccp has been proposed only recently. When the state space of a system is finite, the ordinary notion of bisimilarity can be computed via the well-known partition refinement algorithm, but unfortunately, this algorithm does not work for ccp bisimilarity. In this paper, we propose a variation of the partition refinement algorithm for verifying ccp bisimilarity. To the best of our knowledge this is the first work providing for the automatic verification of program equivalence for ccp.