On the Expressive Power of Restriction and Priorities in CCS with replication

International audienceWe study the expressive power of restriction and its interplay with replication. We do this by considering several syntactic variants of CCS! (CCS with replication instead of recursion) which differ from each other in the use of restriction with respect to replication. We consider three syntactic variations of CCS! which do not allow the use of an unbounded number of restrictions: C1 is the fragment of CCS! not allowing restrictions under the scope of a replication. C2 is the restriction-free fragment of CCS!. The third variant is C3 which extends C1 with Phillips' priority guards. We show that the use of unboundedly many restrictions in CCS! is necessary for obtaining Turing expressiveness in the sense of Busi et al [8]. We do this by showing that there is no encoding of RAMs into C2 which preserves and reflects convergence. We also prove that up to failures equivalence, there is no encoding from CCS! into C1 nor from C1 into C2. As lemmata for the above results we prove that convergence is decidable for C1 and that language equivalence is decidable for CCS2. As corollary it follows that convergence is decidable for restriction-free CCS. Finally, we show the expressive power of priorities by providing an encoding of RAMs in C3