The first and the second author introduced reversible ccs (rccs) in order to model concurrent computations where certain actions are allowed to be reversed. Here we show that the core of the construction can be analysed at an abstract level, yielding a theorem of pure category theory which underlies the previous results. This opens the way to several new examples; in particular we demonstrate an application to Petri nets. 1

In 1981 Structural Operational Semantics (SOS) was introduced as a systematic way to define operational semantics of programming languages by a set of rules of a certain shape [G.D. Plotkin, A structural approach to operational semantics, Technical

RCCS is a variant of Milner's CCS where processes are allowed a controlled form of backtracking. It turns out that the RCCS reinterpretation of a CCS process is equivalent, in the sense of weak bisimilarity, to its causal transition system in CCS. This can be used to develop an efficient method for designing distributed algorithms, which we illustrate here by deriving a distributed algorithm for assembling trees. This requires solving a highly distributed consensus, and a comparison with a traditional CCS-based solution shows that the code we obtain is shorter, easier to understand, and easier to prove correct by hand, or even to verify.

Abstract. Reversible structures are computational units that may progress forward and backward and are primarily inspired by dna circuits. We demonstrate a standardization theorem that bears a quadratic algorithm for reachability when units have unique id. We also discuss the encoding of a reversible concurrent calculus into reversible structures. 1

doi:10.1017/S0960129511000429 A hierarchy of reverse bisimulations on stable configuration structures