A categorial approach to reaction systems: First steps.

In the literature, one encounters the intensely studied classical set-based reaction systems and the more recently introduced generalization to graph-based reaction systems where the considered graphs are directed, simple, and edge-labeled. In this paper, we propose a categorical approach to reaction systems so that a wider spectrum of data structures becomes available on which reaction systems can be based including various types of graphs and of graph-like structures like unlabeled graphs, vertex-labeled graphs, bipartite graphs, and a variety of types of hypergraphs. But also algebraic structures like monoids fit into the framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]