Conformance and Refinement of Behavior in pi-calculus

Process algebras are widely accepted for the specification of software systems. In partic-ular, pi-calculus addresses the description of dynamic systems, and permits their analysis for bisimilarity and other interesting properties. Though bisimilarity determines the equivalence of behavior, more flexible relations are required in the context of Software Engineering. In this paper we present a relation of compatibility in the context of pi-calculus which formal-izes the notion of conformance of behavior between software components. Our approach is enhanced with the definition of a relation of inheritance among processes. This relation preserves compatibility and indicates whether a process is a specialization or refinement of another one. The suitability of our approach is shown by its application to the field of Soft-ware Architecture