Adhesive High-Level Replacement Systems: A New Categorical Framework for Graph Transformation

Abstract

Adhesive high-level replacement (HLR) systems are introduced as a new categorical framework for graph transformation in the double pushout (DPO) approach, which combines the well-known concept of HLR systems with the new concept of adhesive categories introduced by Lack and Sobocinacute;ski.

In this paper we show that most of the HLR properties, which had been introduced to generalize some basic results from the category of graphs to high-level structures, are valid already in adhesive HLR categories. This leads to a smooth categorical theory of HLR systems which can be applied to a large variety of graphs and other visual models. As a main new result in a categorical framework we show the Critical Pair Lemma for the local confluence of transformations. Moreover we present a new version of embeddings and extensions for transformations in our framework of adhesive HLR systems.