Abstract

We develop a theory of equivalences for timed systems. Two systems are equivalent iff external observers cannot observe differences in their behavior. The notion of equivalence depends, therefore, on the distinguishing power of the observers. The power of an observer to measure time results in untimed, clock, and timed equivalences: an untimed observer cannot measure the time difference between events; a clock observer uses a clock to measure time differences with finite precision; a timed observer is able to measure time differences with arbitrary precision. We show that the distinguishing power of clock observers grows with the number of observers, and approaches, in the limit, the distinguishing power of a timed observer. More precisely, given any equivalence for untimed systems, two timed systems are k-clock congruent, for a nonnegative integer k, iff their compositions with every environment that uses k clocks are untimed equivalent. Both k-clock bisimulation congruence and k-cloc...

Citations