Towards a modal logic for /spl pi/-calculus

Abstract

The pi-calculus is one of the most important mobile process calculi and has been well studied in literature. Temporal logic is thought of as a good compromise between description convenience and abstraction and can support useful computational applications, such as model-checking. In this paper, we use a symbolic transition graph inherited from pi-calculus to model concurrent systems. A wide class of processes, that is, finite-control processes, can be represented as a finite symbolic transition graph. A new version of modal logic for the pi-calculus, an extension of the modal mu-calculus with Boolean expressions over names, and primitives for name input and output are introduced as an appropriate temporal logic for the pi-calculus. Since we make a distinction between proposition and predicate, the possible interactions between recursion and first-order quantification can be solved. A concise semantics interpretation for our modal logic is given. Based on this work, we provide a model checking algorithm for the logic. This algorithm follows Winskel's well known tag set method to deal with the fixpoint operator. As for the problem of name instantiating, our algorithm follows the 'on-the-fly' style, and systematically employs schematic names. The correctness of the algorithm is shown