Strictifying and taming directed paths in Higher Dimensional Automata

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that restricting to 'nice' schedulings in directed path spaces of Higher Dimensional Automata does not alter their topological properties, simplifying analysis with elementary algebraic topology tools.

Contribution

It provides an accessible proof that 'nice' schedulings preserve topological properties, extending prior results with elementary methods like the nerve lemma.

Findings

Restricting to 'nice' schedulings does not change topological properties.

Elementary algebraic topology methods can be used to analyze directed path spaces.

The results generalize previous findings by Ziemianski with simpler proofs.

Abstract

Directed paths have been used by several authors to describe concurrent executions of a program. Spaces of directed paths in an appropriate state space contain executions with all possible legal schedulings. It is interesting to investigate whether one obtains different topological properties of such a space of executions if one restricts attention to schedulings with "nice" properties, eg involving synchronizations. This note shows that this is not the case, ie that one may operate with nice schedulings without inflicting any harm. Several of the results in this note had previously been obtained by Ziemianski. We attempt to make them accessible for a wider audience by giving an easier proof for these findings by an application of quite elementary results from algebraic topology; notably the nerve lemma.