The purpose of this paper is to provide a construction to model shared-variable systems using higher-dimensional automata which is compositional in the sense that the parallel composition of completely independent systems is modeled by the standard tensor product of HDAs and nondeterministic choice is represented by the coproduct.

Higher-dimensional automata, i.e., pointed labeled precubical sets, are a powerful combinatorial-topological model for concurrent systems. In this paper, we show that for every (nonempty) connected polyhedron there exists a shared-variable system such that the higher-dimensional automaton modeling the state space of the system has the homotopy type of the polyhedron.