Dipaths and dihomotopies in a cubical complex (Q2573655)

Ditopology is a relatively new area of topology in which the objects of interest are spaces which are locally partially ordered. The subject derives from computer science where it was introduced to study higher dimensional automata. Such automata serve to model concurrent processes and their access to shared resources. The ``flow'' of the processes has a natural structure as a cubical complex, but one which is ``directed'' by the flow of the processes. Forbidden resource allocations correspond to sub-complexes. However this paper concerns itself purely with the topological aspects of directed complexes. The combinatorial model of a ditopological space is a \(\square\)-set, built up, as the notation suggests, from cubes. A natural question that one can ask is whether a dihomotopy on such a set is dihomotopic to a ``combinatorial'' path that lies in the one skeleton of the \(\square\)-set. This paper shows that any dipath from a vertex to a vertex in a non-self-intersecting \(\square\)-set is dihomotopic a combinatorial homotopy. Non-self-intersecting means that the \(\square\)-set does not have cubes with two faces the same. The proofs are geometric and constructive in nature. The paper can be read without prior knowledge of ditopology.