In: Bull. EATCS, Vol. 38, pages 154-163. 1989.
Abstract: The paper tries to clarify the relationship of various semantic equivalences with regard to the property of preservation under refinement of actions (a semantic equivalence is preserved under action refinement if two equivalent processes remains equivalent after replacing the occurences of an action by a more complicated process). The authors illustrate by interesting examples that there are several equivalences based on partial orders which are not preserved by refinement, that it is not necessary to employ partial order semantics to achieve preservation under refinement, and that the appropriate equivalence notion has to be established carefully depending on the considered questions.
Keywords: partial order semantics; semantic equivalence; preservation (under) refinement (of actions); bisimulation.