Strong bisimulation for labelled transition systems is one of the most
fundamental equivalences in process algebra, and has been generalised to
numerous classes of systems that exhibit richer transition behaviour. Nearly
all of the ensuing notions are instances of the more general notion of
coalgebraic bisimulation. Weak bisimulation, however, has so far been much less
amenable to a coalgebraic treatment. Here we attempt to close this gap by
giving a coalgebraic treatment of (parametrized) weak equivalences, including
weak bisimulation. Our analysis requires that the functor defining the
transition type of the system is based on a suitable order-enriched monad,
which allows us to capture weak equivalences by least fixpoints of recursive
equations. Our notion is in agreement with existing notions of weak
bisimulations for labelled transition systems, probabilistic and weighted
systems, and simple Segala systems.Comment: final versio
