Theory of traces (Q1107296)

The paper gives a good self contained introduction to the theory of traces, a theory which provides a mathematical description of the behaviour of concurrent systems. Its aim is to reconcile the sequential nature of observations of the system behaviour on the one hand and the nonsequential nature of causality between the actions of the system on the other hand. The paper presents a major portion of the theory of traces in a uniform way, holding a good balance between two possible sights of the subject (as partial commutative monoids resp. as labelled partial orders/\(labelled\) acyclic graphs). Furthermore a second part presents applications to Petri nets (condition/\(event\) systems).