Executing bigraphical reactive systems

Abstract

In order to enable experimentations and simulations of bigraphs, we need an implementation of their dynamics. In this paper, we tackle the matching issue of this task. We present a solution based on an investigation on graph matching. We propose to simulate a bigraphical reactive system (i.e., bigraphs with a set of reaction rules that allow their rewriting) with a graph transformation system. First, we translate a bigraph to a ranked graph. This translation is ensured by defining a faithful functor that allows to move from the bigraph category to the ranked graph category. Then, we show that reaction rules can be simulated with graph rules. Hence, we provide a formal basis allowing to execute bigraph transformations by simulating their translation aiming to use well-established and efficient graph transformation tools.