Record CSP stable failures and CSP divergences, treating behaviour after a CSP divergence as unrestricted. This can detect both stable refusal of progress and endless internal activity.
CSP internal choice 2026-10-31
The process may internally choose either branch, independently of the environment's offered CSP events. Consequently it can have more CSP stable failures than the corresponding CSP external choice, despite having the same CSP traces.
CSP refinement 2026-10-31
Implementation has only behaviours permitted by specification in CSP semantic model . In particular, CSP traces model refinement means ; the other models additionally constrain CSP stable failures or CSP divergences.
CSP stable state 2026-10-31
A state with no outgoing CSP internal action. A CSP stable failure records a refusal only after such a state has been reached.
The obstruction is that the property is about where a transition originates, whereas the three standard CSP semantic models identify processes that can disagree about this fact. Take fresh and compare
In , the only transition leaves a CSP stable state, so the property holds. Initially has both an transition to and a CSP internal action to . Its initial state is therefore not a CSP stable state, and its direct transition violates the property.
Nevertheless both have exactly the CSP traces and . Initially their possible stable observations offer exactly , so their initial CSP stable failures are precisely with . After , both can refuse every CSP event. Neither has a CSP divergence: the hidden can occur at most once. Therefore
No CSP refinement test in one of these models can separate semantically equal operands. This also rules out placing the operand in a fixed context of ordinary CSP operators before the test, since those operators respect the model's equality. A model recording more about the interleaving of stability and acceptance, or an additional operator that explicitly observes stability, would be needed.
For a finite CSP trace , let be its sequence of values on and its sequence of values on , with channel names removed. Restrict the external alphabet to these two channels. The behavioural CSP trace specification for an unbounded FIFO buffer is
where means prefix of a list, not merely subsequence. Outputs must therefore occur in input order, cannot duplicate or invent values, and cannot precede their inputs. Applying the condition to every CSP trace also checks every execution prefix.
For a legal , write , so is the pending FIFO queue content. Define the events that must remain available by
In addition to the CSP trace condition, require the behavioural CSP stable failure condition
Thus an unbounded FIFO buffer cannot stably refuse any new input, and a nonempty FIFO buffer cannot stably refuse its oldest pending output. An empty FIFO buffer can refuse every output. Readiness of an input and readiness of an output are required together; the environment may choose either. These conditions do not require an output while the environment refuses to accept it. In a CSP failures-divergences model specification, also exclude CSP divergence; the stable-readiness condition alone does not rule out an implementation that loops internally forever without reaching a CSP stable state.
First define the ordinary unbounded FIFO buffer:
Now use CSP internal choice to permit an immediate stop:
An execution choosing the first branch can perform every legal CSP trace satisfying the prefix of a list condition in part (a). Conversely that condition excludes all other CSP traces, so no process satisfying it can have more CSP traces. The second branch adds no new CSP trace, since the empty CSP trace is already present.
The second branch does add the CSP stable failure for any . This violates mandatory input readiness. Therefore the process has the maximum possible CSP trace set and fails the CSP stable failure specification. The qualification is , as is implicit for a useful FIFO buffer; with an empty value type there is no input-readiness event to violate. Maximizing the number of CSP traces does not pick a unique process in the finer models: other processes with the same complete legal CSP trace set and extra refusals also qualify.
Use fresh event tags to tell apart an action by and an interrupting action by . Put and introduce a disjoint copy . Let fix and map each to , and put . Define a process that always accepts an event from by
and an ordinary CSP interrupt handler by
Finally let fix every original event and send back to . A simulation containing no occurrence of the new operator is
Here is the ordinary CSP interrupt, and the CSP event renaming is applied after the CSP parallel composition. It is non-injective, so part (c) explains why moving it inside would be unsafe.
Before the interrupt, 's events in synchronize with on the same events. Its events outside are unprimed and do not synchronize with . Meanwhile 's events outside are primed; they synchronize with and thereby interrupt and discard . After the first such event, the left operand is , so it imposes no further restriction on ; final CSP event renaming then yields exactly the remaining behaviour of .
For a formal strong bisimulation, relate a pre-interrupt state to
and an already-interrupted state to
The three visible cases match the rules in part (d), including both transitions when both operands offer the same event outside . A CSP internal action of never activates , while a CSP internal action of remains possible exactly until the interrupt. The controller adds no CSP internal actions. Thus transitions match in both directions and related derivatives remain related.
Consequently this simulation is stronger than merely CSP trace equivalent:
It preserves CSP stable states, their enabled-event sets and their CSP stable failures, and matches every possible infinite run of CSP internal actions. In particular, it introduces neither a premature commitment nor a new CSP divergence. A different simulation that guesses an interrupt with a hidden handshake would need a separate refusal analysis; the visible tagging construction above needs no hidden handshake.
The trigger is specifically the first-round reception . A CSP trace restriction cannot by itself guarantee progress after this event, because a finite prefix is compatible with both completion and an indefinitely delayed completion. We need to exclude both a stable refusal to continue and CSP divergence, so use the CSP failures-divergences model.
Here is an explicit conditional check that imposes no progress requirement before the trigger. Build the reachable labelled transition system of and observe coordinator rounds with a two-phase monitor: it starts in the first-return phase and toggles on each . Collect the set of system derivatives immediately after a true return in the first-return phase. This distinguishes the survey's return from the decision's return, without changing any system transitions. For fixed finite , the set is finite. Define
Here denotes CSP internal choice. Perform the single CSP refinement check
Equivalently, check each post-trigger derivative individually against after the displayed CSP hiding. If the trigger is unreachable, the conditional property is vacuously true and there is no post-trigger check to perform.
The CSP internal choice in deliberately permits any next shutdown, including an implementation that offers only one of the remaining shutdowns. It forbids a stable refusal of all remaining shutdowns, has no CSP divergence, and permits at most distinct shutdowns before . A CSP external choice over all remaining nodes would instead demand simultaneous readiness for every remaining shutdown and would unnecessarily reject the protocol's sequential delivery.
After hiding all other actions, endless internal work becomes a CSP divergence and a blocked unfinished state becomes a forbidden CSP stable failure. Since there are only possible shutdown actions and duplicates are excluded by CSP traces, every maximal progressing execution must complete all . As usual for untimed CSP, this progress claim assumes the environment allows shutdown signals to occur; it supplies no wall-clock deadline. No fairness assumption requiring the coordinator eventually to initiate a survey has been smuggled into this conditional check.
For the defined system the check succeeds. Immediately after the trigger all statuses are idle and frozen. The only message work left is the second round: node sends the decision to node , nodes through forward it, and node receives it. These are exactly more message transfers. Each node then has its one shutdown action, and the message can advance even while an earlier node's shutdown is pending. Thus there are no remaining status changes, no message cycle, and no unfinished global state in which every action is blocked. The measure
starts at , is nonnegative, and decreases on every subsequent transition. This excludes any hidden infinite run; before all shutdowns finish there is either an enabled message transfer or an enabled shutdown signal. The operational argument proves the conditional claim for every ; finite state enumeration is only a supporting check.
Strong bisimulation 2026-10-31
A relation on states of labelled transition systems matching every transition with a transition of the same label in either direction, with successor states again related. In particular, transitions are matched individually, rather than silently skipped. For CSP processes this preserves CSP traces, CSP stable failures and CSP divergences.