Cartesian bicategories with choice

Abstract: Relational structures are emerging as ubiquitous mathematical machinery in the semantics of open systems of various kinds. Cartesian bicategories are a well-known categorical algebra of relations that has proved especially useful in recent applications. The passage between a category and its bicategory of relations is an important question that has been widely studied for decades. We study an alternative construction that yields a cartesian bicategory of relations. Its behaviour is closely related to the axiom of choice, which itself can be expressed in the language of cartesian bicategories.