Abstract

: Concurrent transition systems (CTS's), are ordinary nondeterministic transition systems that have been equipped with additional concurrency information, specified in terms of a binary residual operation on transitions. Each CTS C freely generates a complete CTS or computation category C , whose arrows are equivalence classes of finite computation sequences, modulo a congruence induced by the concurrency information. The categorical composition on C induces a "prefix" partial order on its arrows, and the computations of C are conveniently defined to be the ideals of this partial order. The definition of computations as ideals has some pleasant properties, one of which is that the notion of a maximal ideal in certain circumstances can serve as a replacement for the more troublesome notion of a fair computation sequence. To illustrate the utility of CTS's, we use them to define and investigate a dataflow-like model of concurrent computation. The model consists of machines, which ...

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