Rewriting structured cospans
Resource type
Author/contributor
- Cicala, Daniel (Author)
Title
Rewriting structured cospans
Abstract
We develop a theory of rewriting for structured cospans in order to extend compositional methods for modeling open networks. First, we introduce a category whose objects are structured cospans and establish conditions under which it is adhesive or a topos. These results guarantee that double pushout rewriting can be applied in this setting. We then define structured cospan grammars and construct their associated languages via a 2-categorical framework, capturing both network composition and rewrite dynamics. As an application, we show that for graphs, hypergraphs, Petri nets, and their typed variants, any grammar induces the same language as its corresponding discrete grammar. This equivalence enables an inductive characterization of rewriting, thereby generalizing classical results from graph transformation to a broader class of categorical models.
Publication
Mathematical Structures in Computer Science
Date
2026/01
Volume
36
Pages
e28
Citation Key
cicalaRewritingStructuredCospans2026
Accessed
10/20/26, 2:36 PM
ISSN
0960-1295, 1469-8072
Language
en
Library Catalog
Cambridge University Press
Citation
Cicala, D. (2026). Rewriting structured cospans. Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, 36, e28. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960129526100668
Department
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