Some Concurrency Models In A Categorical Framework (Extended Abstract)

CHIARA BODEI Dipartimento di Informatica, Universit`a di Pisa Corso Italia, 40, I-56125 Pisa, Italy chiara@di.unipi.it The paper defines a taxonomy of concurrent models. Concurrent models are seen as categories and passages between models as functors. We particularly care about the notions of concurrency, causal and temporal dependencies and their possible different perception. According to the chosen model, only part of these notions are, indeed, relevant and recoverable from the observation of a concurrent system. 1 Introduction In the last decades a great deal of efforts have been devoted to study suitable models in order to describe concurrent and distributed systems and to understand their semantics. Several and heterogeneous models have been introduced, each focusing on a peculiar aspect of concurrency and laying at a particular description level. Categories, as in 1;2;3 , can help in classifying the different models and in formally characterizing the passages between them. ..