Causality and Concurrency in Beta-binders

Causal relations allow us to understand the causes of single transitions/ events in a computation and, consequently, to acquire information on the whole systems. In this paper a definition of a causal relation and of an enabling relation for Beta-binders is given, together with the description of some important properties of these relations; in particular we show that the concurrency relation is the complement of the union of causal and enabling relations for each possible computation. The application domains which we are mostly interested in are biology and medical sciences, thus the application of the defined relations to a model of the intensively studied ERK/MAPK pathway is described.