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This is a tutorial on the general notions of Operational Semantics and Behavioural Equivalence. In order to design and reason about systems we must provide some semantics to the particular formalism, language, or calculus we use to describe such systems. There are several ways in which we can define such semantics. One which is particularly useful to reason about system behaviour is known as Operational Semantics. This is usualy defined via the mathematical notion of rewriting systems, or transition systems, closely related to automata. An essential question about how systems behave is that of system equivalence. What does it mean, and when can we say that two systems behave ``in the same way''? Unless we know whether a given system is equivalent to another or not, we cannot state that we understand its behaviour. This question is addressed in this tutorial by presenting the concepts of similarity and bisimilarity.
The slides are available in the following formats: