A Name-free Account of Action Calculi

Abstract

Action calculi provide a unifying framework for representing a variety of models of communication, such as CCS, Petri nets and the π-calculus, within a unified setting. A central idea is to model the interaction between actions using names. We introduce a name-free account of action calculi, called the closed action calculi, and show that there is a strong correspondence between the original presentation and the name-free presentation. These results show that, although names play an important presentational role, they are in some sense inessential.