A compositional approach to structuring and refinement of typed graph grammars

Abstract Based on a categorical semantics that has been developed for typed graph grammars we uses colimits (pushouts) to model composition and (reverse) graph grammar morphisms to describe refinements of typed graph grammars. Composition of graph grammars w.r.t. common subgrammars is shown to be compatible with the semantics, i.e. the semantics of the composed grammar is obtained as the composition of the semantics of the component grammars. Moreover, the structure of a composed grammar is preserved during a refinement step in the sense that compatible refinements of the components induce a refinement of the composition. The concepts and results are illustrated by an example.