Bisimulation maps in presheaf categories

Abstract

The category of presheaves on a (small) category is a suitable semantic universe to study behaviour of various dynamical systems. In particular, presheaves can be used to record the executions of a system and their morphisms correspond to simulation maps for various kinds of state-based systems. In this paper, we introduce a notion of bisimulation maps between presheaves (or executions) to capture well known behavioural equivalences in an abstract way. We demonstrate the versatility of this framework by working out the characterisations for standard bisimulation, \(\forall\)-fair bisimulation, and branching bisimulation.