LAUSR

Distributed systems are often organized in chains of components (e.g. business process chains), where each component naturally has a double-sided (left and right) interface. We suggest a corresponding, highly abstract and general framework (in mathematical terms: a monoid) of components and their composition, with minimal assumptions on the underlying global infrastructure (in fact, just a global set of symbols). As a fundamental property, decisive for the composition of more than two components, composition of such properties turns out to be associative. We discuss a number of instantiations of this framework (mainly classes of Petri nets), some of which preserve important properties (such as soundness of workflows) under composition. We glance at a number of generalizations and specializations.