Reactive Systems, Barbed Semantics, and the Mobile Ambients

Reactive systems, proposed by Leifer and Milner, represent a meta-framework aimed at deriving behavioral congruences for those specification formalisms whose operational semantics is provided by rewriting rules. Despite its applicability, reactive systems suffered so far from two main drawbacks. First of all, no technique was found for recovering a set of inference rules, e.g. in the so-called SOS style, for describing the distilled observational semantics. Most importantly, the efforts focused on strong bisimilarity, tackling neither weak nor barbed semantics. Our paper addresses both issues, instantiating them on a calculus whose semantics is still in a flux: Cardelli and Gordon’s mobile ambients. While the solution to the first issue is tailored over our case study, we provide a general framework for recasting (weak) barbed equivalence in the reactive systems formalism. Moreover, we prove that our proposal captures the behavioural semantics for mobile ambients proposed by Rathke and Sobociński and by Merro and Zappa Nardelli.