Given an automaton, its behaviour can be modelled as the sets of strings over an alphabet A that can be accepted from any of its states. When considering concurrent systems, we can see a concurrent agent as an automaton, where non-determinism derives from the fact that its states can offer a different behaviour at different moments in time. Non-deterministic computations between a pair of states can then no longer be described as a ‘set’ of strings in a free monoid. Consequently, between two states we will have a labelled structured set of computations, where the structure describes the possibility of two computations parting from each other while maintaining the same observable steps. In this paper, we shall consider different kinds of observation domains and related structured sets of computations. Structured sets of computations will be organised as a category of generalised trees built over a meet-semilattice monoid formalizing the observation domain. Theorems allowing us to introduce the usual concurrency operators in the models and relating different models will then be obtained by first considering ordinary functors (on and between the observation domains), and then lifting them to the categories of structured sets of computations
The study of algebraic modelling of labelled non-deterministic concurrent processes leads us to consider a category LB, obtained from a complete meet-semilattice B and from B-valued equivalence relations. We prove that, if B has enough properties, then LB presents a two-fold internal logical structure, induced by two doctrines definable on it: one related to its families of subobjects and one to its families of regular subobjects. The first doctrine is Heyting and makes LB a Heyting category, the second one is Boolean. We will see that the difference between these two logical structures, namely the different behaviour of the negation operator, can be interpreted in terms of a distinction between non-deterministic and deterministic behaviours of agents able to perform computations in the context of the same process. Moreover, the sorted first-order logic naturally associated with LB can be extended to a modal/temporal logic, again using the doctrinal setting. Relations are also drawn to other computational models.
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