The theme of this paper is profunctors, and their centrality and ubiquity in understanding concurrent computation. Profunctors (a.k.a. distributors, or bimodules) are a generalisation of relations to categories. Here they are first presented and motivated via spans of event structures, and the semantics of nondeterministic dataflow. Profunctors are shown to play a key role in relating models for concurrency and to support an interpretation as higher-order processes (where input and output may be processes). Two recent directions of research are described. One is concerned with a language and computational interpretation for profunctors. This addresses the duality between input and output in profunctors. The other is to investigate general spans of event structures (the spans can be viewed as special profunctors) to give causal semantics to higher-order processes. For this it is useful to generalise event structures to allow events which “persist.”

In this dissertation we investigate presheaf models for concurrent computation. Our aim is to provide a systematic treatment of bisimulation for a wide range of concurrent process calculi. Bisimilarity is defined abstractly in terms of open maps as in the work of Joyal, Nielsen and Winskel. Their work inspired this thesis by suggesting that presheaf categories could provide abstract models for concurrency with a built-in notion of bisimulation. We show how

We represent concurrent processes as Boolean propositions or gates, cast in the role of acceptors of concurrent behavior. This properly extends other mainstream representations of concurrent behavior such as event structures, yet is defined more simply. It admits an intrinsic notion of duality that permits processes to be viewed as either schedules or automata. Its algebraic structure is essentially that of linear logic, with its morphisms being consequence-preserving renamings of propositions, and with its operations forming the core of a natural concurrent programming language. 1

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We consider a class of Kripke Structures in which the atomic propositions are events. This enables us to represent worlds as sets of events and the transition and satisfaction relations of Kripke structures as the subset and membership relations on sets. We use this class, called event Kripke structures, to model concurrency. The obvious semantics for these structures is a true concurrency semantics. We show how several aspects of concurrency can be easily defined, and in addition get distinctions between causality and enabling, and choice and nondeterminism. We define a duality for event Kripke structures, and show how this duality enables us to convert between imperative and declarative views of programs, by treating states and events on the same footing. We provide pictorial representations of both these views, each encoding all the information to convert to the other. We define a process algebra of event Kripke structures, showing how to combine them in the usual ways---parallel co...

A new notion of a general morphism of Petri nets is introduced. The new morphisms are shown to properly include the morphisms considered so far. The resulting category of general Petri nets is shown to admit products. Here, it is shown that the new notion turns out to be indispensable to facilitate functoriality of synthesis of transition systems by means of (labelled) state machines. In the companion paper this result is used to synthesize concrete asynchronous systems studied by Morin as a mixed products of state machines. Uoglnione Morfizmy Sieci Petriego Streszczenie W pracy zaproponowane nowe, uoglnione poj#cie morfizmu dla sieci Petriego. Pokazano, #e klasa tych morfizmw jest istotnie bogatsza od dotychczas rozwa#anych klas morfizmw. Otrzymana w ten sposb kategoria sieci Petriego posiada produkty. W niniejszej pracy pokazano, i# uoglnione morfizmy s# niezb#dne do zapewnienia funktorialno#ci procesu syntezy systemw tranzycji za pomoc# (etykietowanych) maszyn stanowych. W innej p...

Chu spaces are a recently developed model of concurrent computation extending automata theory to express branching time and true concurrency. They exhibit in a primitive form the quantum mechanical phenomena of complementarity and uncertainty. The complementarity arises as the duality of information and time, automata and schedules, and states and events. Uncertainty arises when we define a measurement to be a morphism and notice that increasing structure in the observed object reduces clarity of observation. For a Chu space this uncertainty can be calculated numerically in an attractively simple way directly from its form factor to yield the usual Heisenberg uncertainty relation. Chu spaces correspond to wavefunctions as vectors of Hilbert space, whose inner product operation is realized for Chu spaces as right residuation and whose quantum logic becomes Girard's linear logic. 1 Introduction 1.1 Prospects for Chu Spaces The automaton model of this paper, Chu spaces, is an outgrowth ...

This paper ties together three primitivist views of concurrency whose development the author has had some involvement with, namely the arithmetic of schedules, the logic of schedule-automaton duality, and the geometry of automata. Separately each of these views shed considerable light on concurrency. Our goal here is to bring these three views together coherently in the one place. The general picture is as follows. 1 2 3 Arithmetic of Schedules

The aim of this paper is to harness the mathematical machinery around presheaves for the purposes of process calculi. Joyal, Nielsen and Winskel proposed a general definition of bisimulation from open maps. Here we show that open-map bisimulations within a range of presheaf models are congruences for a general process language, in which CCS and related languages are easily encoded. The results are then transferred to traditional models for processes. By first establishing the congruence results for presheaf models, abstract, general proofs of congruence properties can be provided and the awkwardness caused through traditional models not always possessing the cartesian liftings, used in the break-down of process operations, are side-stepped. The abstract results are applied to show that hereditary history-preserving bisimulation is a congruence for CCS-like languages to which is added a refinement operator on event structures as proposed by van Glabbeek and Goltz.

We review the conceptual development of (true) concurrency and branching time starting from Petri nets and proceeding via Mazurkiewicz traces, pomsets, bisimulation, and event structures up to higher dimensional automata (HDAs), whose acyclic case may be identified with triadic event structures and triadic Chu spaces. Acyclic HDAs may be understood as the extension of Boolean logic with a third truth value expressing transition. We prove the necessity of such a third value under mild assumptions about the nature of observable events, and show that the expansion of any complete Boolean basis L to L with a third literal �a expressing a = forms an expressively complete basis for the representation of acyclic HDAs. The main contribution is a new event state × of cancellation, sibling to, serving to distinguish a(b + c) from ab + ac while simplifying the extensional definitions of termination �A and sequence AB. We show that every HDAX (acyclic HDA with ×) is representable in the expansion of L to L × with a fourth literal �a expressing a = ×.