Invariants of directed spaces (Q2463399)

The beginning of the paper collects several categorical and homotopical constructions which could be useful for studying the topological models of concurrent systems. In this geometric approach to concurrency theory called directed algebraic topology, the underlying state space of a concurrent system is modeled by a topological space \(X\) (representing the state space) together with a distinguished set of continuous paths from the segment \([0,1]\) to the space (representing the possible execution paths of the concurrent system). The homotopies and higher dimensional homotopies between these paths model concurrency. Roughly speaking, the common point between all these constructions is the set of homotopy types of spaces of execution paths from a point \(x\) to a point \(y\) with the pair \((x,y)\) running over \(X\times X\), this set being equipped with various categorical structures. This part of the paper can be read as an introduction to the geometric and categorical ideas behind the theory of fundamental categories and of related component categories developed elsewhere (see the bibliography of the paper). But the main contribution of the paper is certainly the attempt to define a good notion of directed homotopy equivalence for these topological models. Indeed, an important problem of directed algebraic topology is that the directed segment is contractible (in the usual sense). So any too naive notion of equivalence, like M. Grandis' notion of d-homotopy, destroys the causal structure of the time flow by passage to the quotient. The author illustrates this problem with the cases of the Swiss Flag PV diagram and of the \(1\)-dimensional branching space. The main result of the paper is a refined notion of d-homotopy preserving the future and past cones up to homotopy in a sufficiently coherent way so that it has a more satisfactory behavior with respect to component categories. This refined notion of d-homotopy seems to be close to other notions of equivalence introduced by M. Grandis.