A compositional semantics for the reversible pi-calculus

Abstract—We introduce a labelled transition semantics for the reversible pi-calculus. It is the first account of a com-positional definition of a reversible calculus, that has both concurrency primitives and name mobility. The notion of reversibility is strictly linked to the notion of causality. We discuss the notion of causality induced by our calculus, and we compare it with the existing notions in the literature, in particular for what concerns the syntactic feature of scope extrusion, typical of the pi-calculus. I