  Establishing equivalences between programs or systems is crucial both for
verifying correctness of programs, by establishing that two implementations are
equivalent, and for justifying optimisations and program transformations, by
establishing that a modified program is equivalent to the source one. There
exist several equivalence relations for programs, and bisimulations are among
the most versatile of these equivalences. Among bisimulation relations one
distinguishes strong bisimulation, that requires that each action of a program
is simulated by a single action of the equivalent program, a weak bisimulation
that is a coarser relation, allowing some of the actions to be invisible or
internal moves, and thus not simulated by the equivalent program.
  pNet is a generalisation of automata that model open systems. They feature
variables and hierarchical composition. Open pNets are pNets with holes, i.e.
placeholders inside the hierarchical structure that can be filled later by
sub-systems.
  This article defines bisimulation relations for the comparison of systems
specified as pNets. We first define a strong bisimulation for open pNets. We
then define an equivalence relation similar to the classical weak bisimulation,
and study its properties. Among these properties we are interested in
compositionality: if two systems are proven equivalent they will be
undistinguishable by their context, and they will also be undistinguishable
when their holes are filled with equivalent systems. We identify sufficient
conditions on the automata to ensure compositionality of strong and weak
bisimulation. The article is illustrated with a transport protocol running
example; it shows the characteristics of our formalism and our bisimulation
relations.
