The Glory of the Past and Geometrical Concurrency

This paper contributes to the general understanding of the geometrical model of concurrency that was named higher dimensional automata (HDAs) by Pratt. In particular we investigate modal logics for such models and their expressive power in terms of the bisimulation that can be captured. The geometric model of concurrency is interesting from two main reasons: its generality and expressiveness, and the natural way in which autoconcurrency and action refinement are captured. Logics for this model, though, are not well investigated, where a simple, yet adequate, modal logic over HDAs was only recently introduced. As this modal logic, with two existential modalities, during and after, captures only split bisimulation, which is rather low in the spectrum of van Glabbeek and Vaandrager, the immediate question was what small extension of this logic could capture the more fine-grained hereditary history preserving bisimulation (hh)? In response, the work in this paper provides several insights. One is the fact that the geometrical aspect of HDAs makes it possible to use for capturing the hh-bisimulation, a standard modal logic that does not employ event variables, opposed to the two logics (over less expressive models) that we compare with. The logic that we investigate here uses standard past modalities and extends the previously introduced logic (called HDML) that had only forward, action-labelled, modalities. Besides, we try to understand better the above issues by introducing a related model that we call ST-configuration structures, which extend the configuration structures of van Glabbeek and Plotkin. We relate this model to HDAs, and redefine and prove the earlier results in the light of this new model. These offer a different view on why the past modalities and geometrical concurrency capture the hereditary history preserving bisimulation. Additional correlating insights are also gained.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

(Un)Decidability for History Preserving True Concurrent Logics

We investigate the satisfiability problem for a logic for true concurrency, whose formulae predicate about events in computations and their causal (in)dependencies. Variants of such logics have been studied, with different expressiveness, corresponding to a number of true concurrent behavioural equivalences. Here we focus on a mu-calculus style logic that represents the counterpart of history-preserving (hp-)bisimilarity, a typical equivalence in the true concurrent spectrum of bisimilarities. It is known that one can decide whether or not two 1-safe Petri nets (and in general finite asynchronous transition systems) are hp-bisimilar. Moreover, for the logic that captures hp-bisimilarity the model-checking problem is decidable with respect to prime event structures satisfying suitable regularity conditions. To the best of our knowledge, the problem of satisfiability has been scarcely investigated in the realm of true concurrent logics. We show that satisfiability for the logic for hp-bisimilarity is undecidable via a reduction from domino tilings. The fragment of the logic without fixpoints, instead, turns out to be decidable. We consider these results a first step towards a more complete investigation of the satisfiability problem for true concurrent logics, which we believe to have notable solvable cases