Comparing Process Calculi Using Encodings

Abstract

Encodings or the proof of their absence are the main way to compare process calculi. To analyse the quality of encodings and to rule out trivial or meaningless encodings, they are augmented with encodability criteria. There exists a bunch of different criteria and different variants of criteria in order to reason in different settings. This leads to incomparable results. Moreover, it is not always clear whether the criteria used to obtain a result in a particular setting do indeed fit to this setting. This paper provides a short survey on often used encodability criteria, general frameworks that try to provide a unified notion of the quality of an encoding, and methods to analyse and compare encodability criteria.