Abstract
The notion of refinement of concurrent and distributed systems is a crucial one in any concurrency model. There are (at least) two distinct notions under the name of refinement, namely refinement of specifications and refinement of machines (automata). It is important to keep these two concepts distinct since their properties, and their mathematical formulation, are, or should be, quite different. A specification describes a whole class of machines and refinement here yields a smaller class of models, whereas a refinement of a machine yields a new, more complex, machine. It is not always clear which of these two notions is under consideration, because sometimes a mixture of the two approaches is appropriate and even because some formalisms allow different interpretations [1], [4], [16].
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© 1994 British Computer Society
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Sabadini, N., Vigna, S., Walters, R.F.C. (1994). A notion of refinement for automata. In: Nivat, M., Rattray, C., Rus, T., Scollo, G. (eds) Algebraic Methodology and Software Technology (AMAST’93). Workshops in Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3227-1_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-3227-1_34
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