Decomposition orders—another generalisation of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic

Abstract

We discuss unique decomposition in partial commutative monoids. Inspired by a result from process theory, we propose the notion of decomposition order for partial commutative monoids, and prove that a partial commutative monoid has unique decomposition iff it can be endowed with a decomposition order. We apply our result to establish that the commutative monoid of weakly normed processes modulo bisimulation definable in ACP ɛ with linear communication, with parallel composition as binary operation, has unique decomposition. We also apply our result to establish that the partial commutative monoid associated with a well-founded commutative residual algebra has unique decomposition.