Bisimulation of automata (Q1822987)

The authors give an algebraic characterization of automata and discuss various types of simulation between them. Their environment is the category PureAut whose objects are so-called incompletely-specified nondeterministic input-only automata with a set of pure states, and whose morphisms are given by certain maps between the sets of pure states. Thus PureAut may be viewed as a non-full subcategory of Set which is shown to be cocomplete and to have epi-mono factorizations. \{The authors do not always use categorical terminology consequently. For instance, they define pure epimorphisms to be those morphisms which are induced by surjections, without clarifying that these are the epimorphisms in PureAut. But this very fact is used when they claim that pure epimorphisms are stable under pushout.\}