A parametric framework for reversible pi-calculi

Abstract

This paper presents a study of causality in a reversible, concurrent setting. There exist various notions of causality inπ-calculus, which differ in the treatment of parallel extrusions of the same name. Hence, by using a parametric way of bookkeeping the order and the dependencies among extruders it is possible to map different causal semantics into the same framework. Starting from this simple observation, we present a uniform framework forreversibleπ-calculi that is parametric with respect to a data structure that stores information about the extrusion of a name. Different data structures yield different approaches to the parallel extrusion problem. We map three well-known causal semantics into our framework. We prove causal-consistency for the three instances of our framework. Furthermore, we prove a causal correspondence between the appropriate instances of the framework and the Boreale-Sangiorgi semantics and an operational correspondence with the reversibleπ-calculus causal semantics.