On the decomposition of asynchronous systems

This paper reports of part of a contunuing investigation of parallel computation, in particular, efforts toward understanding the nature of different types of parallel control. The first section defines an asynchornous system to be a simple type of state machine. This was arrived at in an attempt to generalize from the types of control in parallel program schemata and networks of asynchronous modules without bounded delays. Asychronous systems with output are also defined in a familiar way. The deviation from standard work comes in the definition of a parallel decomposition of asynchronous systems. Some preliminary work on compositions of this type appears in. Such definitions provide a useful analytic tool for discussion of related therioes.