Deadlocks and dihomotopy in mutual exclusion models (Q854184)

Dihomotopy, a form of homotopy theory in which the direction along the path is taken into account, allows one to model the concepts of unsafe and forbidden regions in the discussion of concurrent processes. Dihomotopic paths represent execution traces that are equivalent. These models are referred to as higher-dimensional automata. The trace of an \(n\)-process computation can be seen as lying in an \(n\)-cube. This paper describes how one can obtain results on the essentially differing execution traces (that is to say not dihomotopic) by considering suitable projections of the configuration space onto lower-dimensional faces of the cube.