Motivated by recent work on the derivation of labelled transitions and bisimulation congruences from unlabelled reaction rules, we show how to solve this problem in the DPO (double-pushout) approach to graph rewriting. Unlike in previous approaches, we consider graphs as objects, instead of arrows, of the category under consideration. This allows us to present a very simple way of deriving labelled transitions (called rewriting steps with borrowed context) which smoothly integrates with the DPO approach, has a very constructive nature and requires only a minimum of category theory. The core part of this paper is the proof sketch that the bisimilarity based on rewriting with borrowed contexts is a congruence relation.

The theory of reactive systems, introduced by Leifer and Milner and previously extended by the authors, allows the derivation of well-behaved labelled transition systems (LTS) for semantic models with an underlying reduction semantics. The derivation procedure requires the presence of certain colimits (or, more usually and generally, bicolimits) which need to be constructed separately within each model. In this paper, we o#er a general construction of such bicolimits in a class of bicategories of cospans. The construction sheds light on as well as extends Ehrig and Konig's rewriting via borrowed contexts and opens the way to a unified treatment of several applications.

We introduce G-relative-pushouts (GRPO) which are a 2-categorical generalisation of relative-pushouts (RPO). They are suitable for deriving labelled transition systems (LTS) for process calculi where terms are viewed modulo structural congruence. We develop their basic properties and show that bisimulation on the LTS derived via GRPOs is a congruence, provided that su#ciently many GRPOs exist. The theory is applied to a simple subset of CCS and the resulting LTS is compared to one derived using a procedure proposed by Sewell.

A notion of bigraph is proposed as the basis for a model of mobile interaction. A bigraph consists of two independent structures: a topograph representing locality and a monograph representing connectivity. Bigraphs are equipped with reaction rules to form bigraphical reactive systems (BRSs), which include versions of the -calculus and the ambient calculus. Bigraphs are shown to be a special case of a more abstract notion, wide reactive systems (WRSs), not assuming any particular graphical or other structure but equipped with a notion of width, which expresses that agents, contexts and reactions may all be widely distributed entities. A behavioural theory is established for WRSs using the categorical notion of relative pushout; it allows labelled transition systems to be derived uniformly, in such a way that familiar behavioural preorders and equivalences, in particular bisimilarity, are congruential under certain conditions. Then the theory of bigraphs is developed, and they are shown to meet these conditions. It is shown that, using certain functors, other WRSs which meet the conditions may also be derived; these may, for example, be forms of BRS with additional structure. Simple examples of bigraphical systems are discussed; the theory is developed in a number of ways in preparation for deeper application studies.

The paper presents a case study on the synthesis of labelled transition systems (ltss) for process calculi, choosing as testbed Milner’s Calculus of Communicating System (ccs). The proposal is based on a graphical encoding: each ccs process is mapped into a graph equipped with suitable interfaces, such that the denotation is fully abstract with respect to the usual structural congruence. Graphs with interfaces are amenable to the synthesis mechanism based on borrowed contexts (bcs), proposed by Ehrig and König (which are an instance of relative pushouts, originally introduced by Milner and Leifer). The bc mechanism allows the effective construction of an lts that has graphs with interfaces as both states and labels, and such that the associated bisimilarity is automatically a congruence. Our paper focuses on the analysis of the lts distilled by exploiting the encoding of ccs processes: besides offering some technical contributions towards the simplification of the bc mechanism, the key result of our work is the proof that the bisimilarity on processes obtained via bcs coincides with the standard strong bisimilarity for ccs.

In this paper the concurrent semantics of double-pushout (DPO) graph rewriting, which is classically defined in terms of shift-equivalence classes of graph derivations, is axiomatised via the construction of a free monoidal bi-category. In contrast to a previous attempt based on 2-categories, the use of bi-categories allows to define rewriting on concrete graphs. Thus, the problem of composition of isomorphism classes of rewriting sequences is avoided. Moreover, as a first step towards the recovery of the full expressive power of the formalism via a purely algebraic description, the concept of disconnected rules is introduced, i.e., rules whose interface graphs are made of disconnected nodes and edges only. It is proved that, under reasonable assumptions, rewriting via disconnected rules enjoys similar concurrency properties like in the classical approach.

. In the classical theory of Petri nets, a process is an operational description of the behaviour of a net, which takes into account the causal links between transitions in a sequence of firing steps. In the categorical framework developed in [19, 11], processes of a P/T net are modeled as arrows of a suitable monoidal category: In this paper we lay the basis of a similar characterization for contextual P/T nets, that is, P/T nets extended with read arcs, which allows a transition to check for the presence of a token in a place, without consuming it. 1 Introduction Petri nets [24] are probably the best studied and most used model for concurrent systems: Their range of applications covers a wide spectrum, from their use as a specification tool to their analysis as a suitable semantical domain. A recent extension to the classical model concerns a class of nets where transitions are able to check for the presence of a token in a place without actually consuming it. While the possibility ...

Recently there has been a growing interest towards algebraic structures that are able to express formalisms different from the standard, tree-like presentation of terms. Many of these approaches reveal a specific interest towards their application in the "distributed and concurrent systems" field, but an exhaustive comparison between them is difficult because their presentations can be quite dissimilar. This work is a first step towards a unified view, which is able to recast all those formalisms into a more general one, where they can be easily compared. We introduce a general schema for describing a characteristic normal form for many algebraic formalisms, and show that those normal forms can be thought of as arrows of suitable concrete monoidal categories.

We introduce G-relative-pushouts (GRPO) which are a 2-categorical generalisation of relative-pushouts (RPO). They are suitable for deriving labelled transition systems (LTS) for process calculi where terms are viewed modulo structural congruence. We develop their basic properties and show that bisimulation on the LTS derived via GRPOs is a congruence, provided that suciently many GRPOs exist. The theory is applied to a simple subset of CCS and the resulting LTS is compared to one derived using a procedure proposed by Sewell.

The operational behavior of interactive systems is usually given in terms of transition systems labeled with actions, which, when visible, represent both observations and interactions with the external world. The abstract semantics is given in terms of behavioral equivalences, which depend on the action labels and on the amount of branching structure considered. Behavioural equivalences are often congruences with respect to the operations of the language, and this property expresses the compositionality of the abstract semantics. A simpler approach, inspired by classical formalisms like λ-calculus, Petri nets, term and graph rewriting, and pioneered by the Chemical Abstract Machine [1], defines operational semantics by means of structural axioms and reaction rules. Process calculi representing complex systems, in particular those able to generate and communicate names, are often defined in this way, since structural axioms give a clear idea of the intended structure of the states while reaction rules, which are often non-conditional, give a direct account of the possible steps. Transitions caused by reaction rules, however, are not labeled, since