Context for models of concurrency

Abstract

Many categories have been used to model concurrency. Using any of these, the challenge is to reduce a given model to a smaller representation which nevertheless preserves the relevant computer-scientific information. That is, one wants to replace a given model with a simpler model with the same directed homotopy-type. Unfortunately, the obvious definition of directed homotopy equivalence is too coarse. This paper introduces the notion of context to refine this definition.