Formal Languages and Concurrent Behaviours

This is a tutorial based on a course delivered as part of the International PhD School in Formal Languages and Applications located at the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, Spain. It is focused on an application of formal language theory to represent behaviours of concurrent systems necessitating a generalisation of language theory to traces, which originates with the work of Mazurkiewicz in 1977. The tutorial uses Petri nets as an underlying system model which allows one to clearly distinguish between causality and independence between executions of actions, a major feature of concurrent behaviour.