Contextual Behavioural Metrics (Extended Version)

Abstract: We introduce contextual behavioural metrics (CBMs) as a novel way of measuring the discrepancy in behaviour between processes, taking into account both quantitative aspects and contextual information. This way, process distances by construction take the environment into account: two (non-equivalent) processes may still exhibit very similar behaviour in some contexts, e.g., when certain actions are never performed. We first show how CBMs capture many well-known notions of equivalence and metric, including Larsen's environmental parametrized bisimulation. We then study compositional properties of CBMs with respect to some common process algebraic operators, namely prefixing, restriction, non-deterministic sum, parallel composition and replication.