Event structure semantics for nominal calculi

Abstract

Event structures have been used for giving true concurrent semantics to languages and models of concurrency such as CCS, Petri nets and graph grammars. Although certain nominal calculi have been modeled with graph grammars, and hence their event structure semantics could be obtained as instances of the general case, the main limitation is that in the case of graph grammars the construction is more complex than strictly necessary for dealing with usual nominal calculi and, speaking in categorical terms, it is not as elegant as in the case of Petri nets. The main contribution of this work is the definition of a particular class of graph grammars, called persistent, that are expressive enough to model name passing calculi while simplifying the denotational domain construction, which can be expressed as an adjunction. Finally, we apply our technique to derive event structure semantics for pi-calculus and join-calculus processes. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.