ing yet further from reality, we might proscribe the simultaneous effect of two or more methods on an object's state; doing so, we impose a monoid structure on the fixed set of methods proper to an object class. Applying methods one after the other corresponds to multiplication in the monoid, and applying no methods corresponds to the identity of the monoid. A monoid is a set M with an associative binary operation ffl M : M \ThetaM ! M , usually referred to as `multiplication', which has an identity element e M 2 M . If M = (M; ffl M ; e M ) is a monoid, we often write just M for M, and e for e M ; moreover for m;m 0 2 M , we usually write mm 0 instead of m ffl M m 0 . For example, A , the set of lists containing elements of A, together with concatenation ++ : A \ThetaA ! A and the empty list [ ] 2 A , is a monoid. This example is especially important for the material in later sections. A monoid homomorphism is a structure preserving map between the carriers of ...

this paper we present an approach we call `Distributed Operational Semantics', which models systems of concurrent, interacting objects by diagrams which assign an operational semantics to each object in a system. The behaviour of the whole system is given by a limit construction. In modelling behaviour by limits we follow earlier work by Goguen on Categorical Systems Theory [4, 5, 6]. This approach pays particular attention to the hierarchical structure of systems, and provides means of constructing systems from component parts in a way that captures both complex objects and parallel composition with synchronisation [16]. The operational semantics of objects can be very general: for example, a semantics for the object-oriented specification language FOOPS has been given by modelling objects as unlabelled transition systems; this semantics is summarised in Section 4.2, and a full account is given in [2]. We shall also present examples of systems that use labelled transition systems. A useful property of the examples we present is that they can be readily translated into specifications in the logic programming language Eqlog [9], which provides both a simulator for the system and a logic for reasoning about systems. Like the sheaf semantics for concurrent objects originating with Goguen [8, 3] and further investigated in [22, 16, 2], our approach is essentially constraint based: interactions between objects constrain their possible behaviours, primarily by synchronising on shared subobjects. Constructing the behaviour of a system by taking its limit corresponds to solving those constraints. It is because of its constraint based nature that the translation into Eqlog is so natural. This paper provides a short introduction to Distributed Operational Semantics; a fuller acco...