Coalgebra, Concurrency, and Control

Coalgebra is used to generalize notions and techniques from concurrency theory, in order to apply them to problems concerning the supervisory control of discrete event systems. The main ingredients of this approach are the characterization of controllability in terms of (a variant of) the notion of bisimulation, and the observation that the family of (partial) languages carries a final coalgebra structure. This allows for a pervasive use of coinductive definition and proof principles, leading to a conceptual unification and simplification and, in a number of cases, to more general and more efficient algorithms.