We present two quantitative behavioral equivalences over species of a
chemical reaction network (CRN) with semantics based on ordinary differential
equations. Forward CRN bisimulation identifies a partition where each
equivalence class represents the exact sum of the concentrations of the species
belonging to that class. Backward CRN bisimulation relates species that have
the identical solutions at all time points when starting from the same initial
conditions. Both notions can be checked using only CRN syntactical information,
i.e., by inspection of the set of reactions. We provide a unified algorithm
that computes the coarsest refinement up to our bisimulations in polynomial
time. Further, we give algorithms to compute quotient CRNs induced by a
bisimulation. As an application, we find significant reductions in a number of
models of biological processes from the literature. In two cases we allow the
analysis of benchmark models which would be otherwise intractable due to their
memory requirements.Comment: Extended version of the CONCUR 2015 pape