new technical report from Microsoft Research on process conformance

["Tony Andrews" <tandrews@microsoft.com>]

At the second F2F meeting, there was a discussion about bisimulation vs.
simulation vs. "refinement", and a request for background information on
this topic. A new technical report on this topic is now available at
http://research.microsoft.com/projects/zing/conformance.pdf. This paper
describes the theory behind the conformance checker that we've
implemented.

This is relevant to BPEL in that it provides a framework for determining
whether a BPEL executable process "conforms to" the behavior described
by a given abstract process. And, in particular, why this notion of
conformance is of more practical use than bisimulation.

Tony