Components of the fundamental category. II (Q2463396)

The fundamental category of a pospace, i.e. a topological space equipped with a partial ordering, is the small category with objects the points of the space and with morphisms the dihomotopy classes of nondecreasing continuous maps (called dimaps) from the segment \([0,1]\) endowed with the usual ordering to the pospace. The composition law is induced by the concatenation of paths. A dihomotopy between two dimaps is in this paper a dimap in the space of dimaps preserving the two extremities [\textit{M. Grandis}, Cah. Topol. Géom. Différ. Catég. 44, No.~4, 281--316 (2003; Zbl 1059.55009)]. A van Kampen theorem is known for fundamental categories. This result is useful for inductively computing the fundamental categories of pospaces representing concurrent systems. Unfortunately, the fundamental category is often not small enough, with uncountably many objects and morphisms. A notion of component category of a fundamental category, actually of any small category satisfying an additional hypothesis (the set of isomorphisms must be pure), is introduced in this paper. It is an improvement of the preceding construction given in [\textit{L. Fajstrup, M. Raussen, E. Goubault} and \textit{E. Haucourt}, Appl. Categ. Struct. 12, No.~1, 81--108 (2004; Zbl 1078.55020)] which enables the authors to compress the geometric information contained in the fundamental category. It is defined as the categorical localization of the fundamental category by the greatest Yoneda system. A Yoneda system is a set of morphisms (called Yoneda morphisms) satisfying various conditions. In particular, every Yoneda morphism preserves the past and future cones. The existence of the greatest Yoneda system comes from the fact that the set of Yoneda systems of the fundamental category of a pospace is a locale. The main result of the paper is a van Kampen theorem for component categories allowing inductive computations of the component category of pospaces associated with concurrent systems. Other detailed results about component categories are available in [\textit{E. Haucourt}, Theory Appl. Categ. 16, 736--770, electronic only (2006; Zbl 1117.18006)]. An application to static analysis of concurrent programs was described in [\textit{E. Goubault} and \textit{E. Haucourt}, CONCUR 2005 -- concurrency theory. 16th international conference, CONCUR 2005, San Francisco, CA, USA, August 23--26, 2005. Proceedings. Berlin: Springer. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3653, 503--517 (2005; Zbl 1134.68440)].