This book is an introduction to bisimulation and coinduction and a precursor to the companion book on more advanced topics. Between them, the books analyse the most fundamental aspects of bisimulation and coinduction, exploring concepts and techniques that can be transported to many areas. Bisimulation is a special case of coinduction, by far the most studied coinductive concept. Bisimulation was discovered in Concurrency Theory and processes remain the main application area. This explains the special emphasis on bisimulation and processes that one finds throughout the two volumes.

This volume treats basic topics. It explains coinduction, and its duality with induction, from various angles, starting from some simple results of fixed-point theory. It then goes on to bisimulation, as a tool for defining behavioural equality among processes (bisimilarity), and for proving such equalities. It compares bisimulation with other notions of behavioural equivalence. It also presents a simple process calculus, both to show algebraic techniques for bisimulation and to illustrate the combination of inductive and coinductive reasoning.

The companion volume, Advanced Topics in Bisimulation and Coinduction, edited by Davide Sangiorgi and Jan Rutten, deals with more specialised topics. A chapter recalls the history of the discovery of bisimulation and coinduction. Another chapter unravels the duality between induction and coinduction, both as defining principles and as proof techniques, in terms of the duality between the mathematical notions of algebra and coalgebra and properties such as initiality and finality.