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.”

this paper we consider a very general model of concurrency, the set systems. These are structures C = (E; C) with E a set and C ` 2

This paper combines and extends the material of [GG-a/c/d/e], except for the part in [GG-c] on refinement of transitions in Petri nets and the discussion of TCSP-like parallel composition in [GG-e]. An informal presentation of some basic ingredients of this paper appeared as [GG-b]. Among others, the treatment of action refinement in stable and non-stable event structures is new. The research reported here was supported by Esprit project 432 (METEOR), Esprit Basic Research Action 3148 (DEMON), Sonderforschungsbereich 342 of the TU Munchen, ONR grant N00014-92-J-1974 and the Human Capital and Mobility Cooperation Network EXPRESS (Expressiveness of Languages for Concurrency). Contents

We propose an event based semantics for contextual nets, i.e. an extension of Place/Transition Petri nets where transitions can also have context conditions, modelling resources that can be read without being consumed. The result is a generalization of Winskel’s work on safe nets: the event based semantics is given at categorical level via a chain of coreflections leading from the category WS-CN of weakly safe contextual nets to the category Dom of finitary prime algebraic domains. A fundamental rôle is played by the notion of asymmetric event structures that generalize Winskel’s prime event structures, following an idea similar to that of “possible flow ” introduced by Pinna and Poignè. Asymmetric event structures have the usual causal relation of traditional prime event structures, but replace the symmetric conflict with a relation modelling asymmetric conflict or weak causality. Such relation allows one to represent the new kind of dependency between events arising in contextual nets, as well as the usual symmetric conflict. Moreover it is used in a non-trivial way in the definition of the ordering of configurations, which is different from the standard set-inclusion.

We present an event structure semantics for contextual nets, an extension of P/T Petri nets where transitions can check for the presence of tokens without consuming them (read-only operations). A basic rôle is played by asymmetric event structures, a generalization of Winskel’s prime event structures where symmetric conflict is replaced by a relation modelling asymmetric conflict or weak causality, used to represent a new kind of dependency between events arising in contextual nets. Extending Winskel’s seminal work on safe nets, the truly concurrent event based semantics of contextual nets is given at categorical level via a chain of coreflections

In this paper we address the following question: What type of event structures are suitable for representing the behaviour of general Petri nets? As a partial answer to this question we define a new class of event structures called local event structures and identify a subclass called UL-event structures. We propose that UL-event structures are appropriate for capturing the behaviour of general Petri nets. Our answer is a partial one in that in the proposed event structure semantics, auto-concurrency is filtered out from the behaviour of Petri nets. It turns out that this limited event structure semantics for Petri nets is nevertheless a non-trivial and conservative extension of the (prime) event structure semantics of 1-safe Petri nets provided in [NPW]. We also show that the strong relationship between prime event structures and 1-safe Petri nets established in a categorical framework in [W3] can be extended to the present setting, provided we restrict our attention to the subclass ...

s are available from the same host in the directory /pub/TR/UBLCS/ABSTRACTS in plain text format. All local authors can be reached via e-mail at the address last-name@cs.unibo.it. UBLCS Technical Report Series 93-15 Data Algorithm: A Numerical Method to Extract Shape Information from Gray Scale Images, R. Davoli, F. Tamburini, June 1993. 93-16 Towards Performance Evaluation in Process Algebras, R. Gorrieri, M. Roccetti, July 1993. 93-17 Split and ST Bisimulation Semantics, R. Gorrieri, C. Laneve, July 1993. 93-18 Multilanguage Interoperability, G. Attardi, M. Gaspari, July 1993. 93-19 HERMES: an Expert System for the Prognosis of Hepatic Diseases, I. Bonf a, C. Maioli, F. Sarti, G.L. Milandri, P.R. Dal Monte, September 1993. 93-20 An Information Flow Security Property for CCS, R. Focardi, R. Gorrieri, October 1993. 93-21 A Classification of Security Properties, R. Focardi, R. Gorrieri, October 1993. 93-22 Real Time Systems: A Tutorial, F. Panzieri, R. Davoli, October 1993. 93-23 A Sca...

This paper appeared as Arbeitspapiere der GMD 594, Sankt Augustin 1991. The work presented here has partly been carried out within the Esprit Basic Research Action 3148 (DEMON) and the Sonderforschungsbereich 182 of the University of ErlangenN urnberg. 1 Introduction

Abstract In this paper I compare the expressive power of several models of concurrency based on their ability to represent causal dependence. To this end, I translate these models, in behaviour preserving ways, into the model of higher dimensional automata, which is the most expressive model under investigation. In particular, I propose four different translations of Petri nets, corresponding to the four different computational interpretations of nets found in the literature. I also extend various equivalence relations for concurrent systems to higher dimensional automata. These include the history preserving bisimulation, which is the coarsest equivalence that fully respects branching time, causality and their interplay, as well as the ST-bisimulation, a branching time respecting equivalence that takes causality into account to the extent that it is expressible by actions overlapping in time. Through their embeddings in higher dimensional automata, it is now well-defined whether members of different models of concurrency are equivalent.

Configuration structures provide a model of concurrency generalising the families of configurations of event structures. They can be considered logically, as classes of propositional models; then sub-classes can be axiomatised by formulae of simple prescribed forms. Several equivalence relations for event structures are generalised to configuration structures, and also to general Petri nets. Every configuration structure is shown to be ST-bisimulation equivalent to a prime event structure with binary conflict; this fails for the tighter history preserving bisimulation. Finally, Petri nets without self-loops under the collective token interpretation are shown behaviourally equivalent to configuration structures, in the sense that there are translations in both directions respecting history preserving bisimulation. This fails for nets with self-loops. 1 Introduction The aim of this paper is to connect several models of concurrency, by providing translations between them and studying whi...