Modelling fundamental 2-categories for directed homotopy (Q2575128)

It is strange that such a natural idea as Directed Homotopy has taken such a long time to emerge to form a basic subdiscipline of algebraic topology, but now the introduction of directed homotopy has been partially motivated by deep and important problems within computer science and increasingly within related areas of physics. The idea that a path in a space is traversed in some `time' is often used as a teaching tool in elementary courses in the area of homotopy theory. `Time' is irreversible, so paths shold be irreversible, but groups and groupoids have more accessible algebraic structures than monoids and small categories, thus we have `traditionally' allowed reversal of paths as the norm in homotopy theory. This is no longer as permissible when the basic objects are directed spaces, for example, ordered or partially ordered topological spaces. This results in fundamental categories rather than fundamental groupoids being the relevant objects in dimension 1. The study of invariance under directed homotopy is far richer and more complex than the classical case. In this paper, previous results of the author and others are pushed further and fundamental 2-categories of directed spaces are explored in detail. The paper uses a fair bit of 2-category theoretic terminology but all the notions of that theory that are used here are explicitly reviewed in the paper.