On the semantics of durational actions

AbstractThis paper develops a mathematical framework to describe and reason about semantic theories of processes where actions have a non-zero duration. The framework relies on the notions of reduction and observability and allows one to naturally explain the possible choices to incorporate timing information in terms of process interaction mechanisms. The framework provides a parameterized context where well-known and new theories can be formally compared and classified by a suitable instantiation of the parameters. A proof-technique to derive from the reduction semantics an equivalent SOS-based characterization is also provided