Concurrent and maximally concurrent evolution of nonsequential systems (Q1083185)

Two types of concurrent executions and their semantics are introduced and compared, namely the standard one (in the sense of Petri nets or interleaving approaches - ''execute as possible'') and that of maximally concurrent evolution (''execute as much as possible in parallel''). The COSY path expression formalism is briefly reviewed and used for the definitions of these semantics and for establishing their properties. Especially, several necessary and sufficient conditions for their complete characterization (i.e. criteria for their equivalence) are given. The results are reasonably translatable from COSY expressions into related formalisms. The paper confirms the conjecture that systems for which the maximal concurrent behavior determines the full behavior are easier to analyse than those based on standard semantics.