Automatic Equivalence Proofs for Non-deterministic Coalgebras

Abstract

A notion of generalized regular expressions for a large class of systems modeled as coalgebras, and an analogue of Kleene's theorem and Kleene algebra, were recently proposed by a subset of the authors of this paper. Examples of the systems covered include infinite streams, deterministic automata, Mealy machines and labelled transition systems. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to decide whether two expressions are bisimilar or not. The procedure is implemented in the automatic theorem prover CIRC, by reducing coinduction to an entailment relation between an algebraic specification and an appropriate set of equations. We illustrate the generality of the tool with three examples: infinite streams of real numbers, Mealy machines and labelled transition systems.