Behavioural Notions for Elementary Net Systems

Abstract

We study the relationships between a number of behavioural notions that have arisen in the theory of distributed computing. In order to sharpen the understanding of these relationships we apply the chosen behavioural notions to a basic net-theoretic model of distributed systems called elementary net systems. The behavioural notions that are considered here are trace languages, non-sequential processes, unfoldings and event structures.

The relationships between these notions are brought out in the process of establishing that for each elementary net system, the trace language representation of its behaviour agrees in a strong way with the event structure representation of its behaviour.