On Observing Dynamic Prioritised Actions in SOC

We study the impact on observational semantics for SOC of priority mechanisms which combine dynamic priority with local pre-emption. We define manageable notions of strong and weak labelled bisimilarities for COWS, a process calculus for SOC, and provide alternative characterisations in terms of open barbed bisimilarities. These semantics show that COWS’s priority mechanisms partially recover the capability to observe receive actions (that could not be observed in a purely asynchronous setting) and that high priority primitives for termination impose specific conditions on the bisimilarities.