Autonomous units and their semantics-the concurrent case

Abstract

Communities of autonomous units are rule-based and graph-transformational devices to model processes that act and interact, move and communicate, cooperate and compete in a common environment. The autonomous units are independent of each other, and the environment may be large and structured in such a way that a global synchronization of process activities is not reasonable or not feasible. To reflect this assumption properly, a concurrent-process semantics of autonomous units is introduced and studied in this paper employing the idea of true concurrency. In particular, causal dependency between actions of autonomous units is compared with shift equivalence known from graph transformation, and concurrent processes in the present approach are related to canonical derivations. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.