Cyclic Ordering through Partial Orders *

Overview & Synopsis

The orientation problem for ternary cyclic order relations has been attacked in the literature from combinatorial perspectives, through rotations , and by connection with Petri nets. We propose here a twofold characterization of orientable cyclic orders in terms of symmetries of partial orders as well as in terms of separating sets (cuts). The results are inspired by properties of non-sequential discrete processeses, but also apply to dense structures of any cardinality.