Finitary -adhesive categories

Abstract

Finitary$\mathcal{M}$-adhesive categories are$\mathcal{M}$-adhesive categories with finite objects only, where$\mathcal{M}$-adhesive categories are a slight generalisation of weak adhesive high-level replacement (HLR) categories. We say an object is finite if it has a finite number of$\mathcal{M}$-subobjects. In this paper, we show that in finitary$\mathcal{M}$-adhesive categories we not only have all the well-known HLR properties of weak adhesive HLR categories, which are already valid for$\mathcal{M}$-adhesive categories, but also all the additional HLR requirements needed to prove classical results including the Local Church-Rosser, Parallelism, Concurrency, Embedding, Extension and Local Confluence Theorems, where the last of these is based on critical pairs. More precisely, we are able to show that finitary$\mathcal{M}$-adhesive categories have a unique$\mathcal{E}$-$\mathcal{M}$factorisation and initial pushouts, and the existence of an$\mathcal{M}$-initial object implies we also have finite coproducts and a unique$\mathcal{E}$′-$\mathcal{M}$pair factorisation. Moreover, we can show that the finitary restriction of each$\mathcal{M}$-adhesive category is a finitary$\mathcal{M}$-adhesive category, and finitarity is preserved under functor and comma category constructions based on$\mathcal{M}$-adhesive categories. This means that all the classical results are also valid for corresponding finitary$\mathcal{M}$-adhesive transformation systems including several kinds of finitary graph and Petri net transformation systems. Finally, we discuss how some of the results can be extended to non-$\mathcal{M}$-adhesive categories.