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Turi and Plotkin’s bialgebraic semantics is an abstract approach to specifying the operational semantics of a system, by means of a distributive law between its syntax (encoded as a monad) and its dynamics (an endofunctor). This setup is instrumental in showing that a semantic specification (a coalgebra) satisfies desirable properties: in particular, that it is compositional. In this work, we use the bialgebraic approach to derive well-behaved structural operational semantics of string diagrams, a graphical syntax that is increasingly used in the study of interacting systems across different disciplines. Our analysis relies on representing the two-dimensional operations underlying string diagrams in various categories as a monad, and their bialgebraic semantics in terms of a distributive law for that monad. As a proof of concept, we provide bialgebraic compositional semantics for a versatile string diagrammatic language which has been used to model both signal flow graphs (control theory) and Petri nets (concurrency theory). Moreover, our approach reveals a correspondence between two different interpretations of the Frobenius equations on string diagrams and two synchronisation mechanisms for processes, à la Hoare and à la Milner.
@InProceedings{bonchi_et_al:LIPIcs.CONCUR.2019.37,
author = {Bonchi, Filippo and Piedeleu, Robin and Sobocinski, Pawel and Zanasi, Fabio},
title = {{Bialgebraic Semantics for String Diagrams}},
booktitle = {30th International Conference on Concurrency Theory (CONCUR 2019)},
pages = {37:1--37:17},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-121-4},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2019},
volume = {140},
editor = {Fokkink, Wan and van Glabbeek, Rob},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2019.37},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-109398},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.CONCUR.2019.37},
annote = {Keywords: String Diagram, Structural Operational Semantics, Bialgebraic semantics}
}