  This paper proposes a way to effectively compare the potential of processes
to cause conflict. In discrete event systems theory, two concurrent systems are
said to be in conflict if they can get trapped in a situation where they are
both waiting or running endlessly, forever unable to complete their common
task. The conflict preorder is a process-algebraic pre-congruence that compares
two processes based on their possible conflicts in combination with other
processes. This paper improves on previous theoretical descriptions of the
conflict preorder by introducing less conflicting pairs as a concrete
state-based characterisation. Based on this characterisation, an effective
algorithm is presented to determine whether two processes are related according
to the conflict preorder.
