In mathematics and computer science, a history monoid is a way of representing the histories of concurrently running computer processes as a collection of strings, each string representing the individual history of a process. The history monoid provides a set of synchronization primitives (such as locks, mutexes or thread joins) for providing rendezvous points between a set of independently executing processes or threads.
History monoids occur in the theory of concurrent computation, and provide a low-level mathematical foundation for process calculi, such as CSP the language of communicating sequential processes, or CCS, the calculus of communicating systems. History monoids were first presented by M.W. Shields.[1]
History monoids are isomorphic to trace monoids (free partially commutative monoids) and to the monoid of dependency graphs. As such, they are free objects and are universal. The history monoid is a type of semi-abelian categorical product in the category of monoids.