Parallel Hyperedge Replacement Grammars

In 2018, it was shown that all finitely generated virtually Abelian groups have multiple context-free word problems, and it is still an open problem as to where to precisely place the word problems of hyperbolic groups in the formal language hierarchy. Motivated by this, we introduce a new language class, the parallel hyperedge replacement string languages, containing all multiple context-free and ET0L languages. We show that parallel hyperedge replacement grammars can be "synchronised", which allows us to establish many useful formal language closure results relating to both the hypergraph and string languages generated by various families of parallel hyperedge replacement grammars, laying the foundations for future work in this area.