Within the context of an algebraic theory of processes, an equational specification of process cooperation is provided. Four cases are considered: free merge or interleaving, merging with communication, merging with mutual exclusion of tight regions, and synchronous process cooperation. The rewrite system behind the communication algebra is shown to be confluent and terminating (modulo its permutative reductions). Further, some relationships are shown to hold between the four concepts of merging. © 1984 Academic Press, Inc.

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.”

Labelled transition systems are a simple yet powerful formalism for describing the operational behaviour of computing systems. They can be extended to model concurrency faithfully by permitting transitions between states to be labelled by a collection of actions, denoting a concurrent step. Petri nets (or Place/Transition nets) give rise to such step transition systems in a natural way -- the marking diagram of a Petri net is the canonical transition system associated with it. In this paper, we characterize the class of PN-transition systems, which are precisely those step transition systems generated by Petri nets. We express the correspondence between PN-transition systems and Petri nets in terms of an adjunction between a category of PN-transition systems and a category of Petri nets in which the associated morphisms are behaviour-preserving in a strong and natural sense.

Contents 1 History Preserving Bisimulations on Labelled Event Structures 2 1.1 Finitary Prime Event Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 1.2 Labelled Event Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 1.3 History Preserving Bisimulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 1.4 Relations Between History Preserving Bisimulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2 History Preserving Bisimulations and Refinement 7 2.1 Refinement of Labelled Event Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 2.2 History Preserving Bisimulations vs Refinement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 3 Back and Forth Bisimulation on Sequential Systems 8 3.1 Unfolding transition systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 3.2 Unfolding versus Back-and-Forth Bisimulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 3.3 The Power of the Future Pe

. Models for concurrency can be classified with respect to three relevant parameters: behaviour/system, interleaving/noninterleaving, linear/branching time. When modelling a process, a choice concerning such parameters corresponds to choosing the level of abstraction of the resulting semantics. The classifications are formalized through the medium of category theory. Keywords. Semantics, Concurrency, Models for Concurrency, Categories. Contents 1 Preliminaries 431 2 Deterministic Transition Systems 433 3 Noninterleaving vs. Interleaving Models 436 Synchronization Trees and Labelled Event Structures : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 438 Transition Systems with Independence : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 439 4 Behavioural, Linear Time, Noninterleaving Models 441 Semilanguages and Event Structures : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 443 Trace Languages and Event Structures : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : 446 5 Transition Systems with Independence and Lab...

. In the last few years, the semantics of Petri nets has been investigated in several di#erent ways. Apart from the classical "token game," one can model the behaviour of Petri nets via non-sequential processes, via unfolding constructions, which provide formal relationships between nets and domains, and via algebraic models, which view Petri nets as essentially algebraic theories whose models are monoidal categories. In this paper we show that these three points of view can be reconciled. In our formal development a relevant role is played by DecOcc, a category of occurrence nets appropriately decorated to take into account the history of tokens. The structure of decorated occurrence nets at the same time provides natural unfoldings for Place/Transition (PT) nets and suggests a new notion of processes, the decorated processes, which induce on Petri nets the same semantics as that of unfolding. In addition, we prove that the decorated processes of a net can be axiomatized as the arrows...

Petri Place/Transition (PT) nets are one of the most widely used models of concurrency. However, they still lack, in our view, a satisfactory semantics: on the one hand the “token game ” is too intensional, even in its more abstract interpretations in term of nonsequential processes and monoidal categories; on the other hand, Winskel’s basic unfolding construction, which provides a coreflection between nets and finitary prime algebraic domains, works only for safe nets. In this paper we extend Winskel’s result to PT nets. We start with a rather general category PTNets of PT nets, we introduce a category DecOcc of decorated (nondeterministic) occurrence nets and we define adjunctions between PTNets and DecOcc and between DecOcc and Occ, the category of occurrence nets. The role of DecOcc is to provide natural unfoldings for PT nets, i.e. acyclic safe nets where a notion of family is used for relating multiple instances of the same place. The unfolding functor from PTNets to Occ reduces to Winskel’s when restricted to safe nets, while the standard coreflection between Occ and Dom, the category of finitary prime algebraic domains, when composed with the unfolding functor above, determines a chain of adjunctions between PTNets and Dom.

Abstract. One obtains in this paper a process algebra RCCS, in the style of CCS, where processes can backtrack. Backtrack, just as plain forward computation, is seen as a synchronization and incurs no additional cost on the communication structure. It is shown that, given a past, a computation step can be taken back if and only if it leads to a causally equivalent past. 1

this paper was published as Walicki, M.A. and Meldal, S., 1995, Nondeterministic Operators in Algebraic Frameworks, Tehnical Report No. CSL--TR--95--664, Stanford University

Abstract. Given the combinatorial nature of cellular signalling pathways, where biological agents can bind and modify each other in a large number of ways, concurrent or agent-based languages seem particularly suitable for their representation and simulation [1–4]. Graphical modelling languages such as κ [5–8], or the closely related BNG language [9– 14], seem to afford particular ease of expression. It is unclear however how such models can be implemented. 6 Even a simple model of the EGF receptor signalling network can generate more than 10 23 non-isomorphic species [5], and therefore no approach to simulation based on enumerating species (beforehand, or even on-the-fly) can handle such models without sampling down the number of potential generated species. We present in this paper a radically different method which does not attempt to count species. The proposed algorothm uses a representation of the system together with a super-approximation of its ‘event horizon ’ (all events that may happen next), and a specific correction scheme to obtain exact timings. Being completely local and not based on any kind of enumeration, this algorithm has a per event time cost which is independent of (i) the size of the set of generable species (which can even be infinite), and (ii) independent of the size of the system (ie, the number of agent instances). We show how to refine this algorithm, using concepts derived from the classical notion of causality, so that in addition to the above one also has that the even cost is depending (iii) only logarithmically on the size of the model (ie, the number of rules). Such complexity properties reflect in our implementation which, on a current computer, generates about 10 6 events per minute in the case of the simple EGF receptor model mentioned above, using a system with 10 5 agents. 1