Unique solutions of contractions, CCS, and their HOL formalisation

The unique solution of contractions is a proof technique for bisimilarity that overcomes certain syntactic constraints of Milner's "unique solution of equations" technique. The paper presents an overview of a rather comprehensive formalisation of the core of the theory of CCS in the HOL theorem prover (HOL4), with a focus towards the theory of unique solutions of contractions. (The formalisation consists of about 20,000 lines of proof scripts in Standard ML.) Some refinements of the theory itself are obtained. In particular we remove the constraints on summation, which must be weakly-guarded, by moving to rooted contraction, that is, the coarsest precongruence contained in the contraction preorder.