A description of incidence rings of group automata

Group automata occur in the Krohn-Rhodes Decomposition Theorem and have been extensively investigated in the literature. The incidence rings of group automata were introduced by the first author in analogy with group rings and incidence rings of graphs. The main theorem of the present paper gives a complete description of the structure of incidence rings of group automata in terms of matrix rings over group rings and their natural modules. As a consequence, when the ground ring is a field, we can use known group algebra results to determine when the incidence algebra is prime, semiprime, Artinian or semisimple. We also offer sufficient conditions for the algebra to be semiprimitive.