Categorical Foundations for K-theory

K-Theory was originally defined by Grothendieck as a contravariant functor from a subcategory of schemes to abelian groups, known today as K0. The same kind of construction was then applied to other fields of mathematics, like spaces and (not necessarily commutative) rings. In all these cases, it consists of some process applied, not directly to the object one wants to study, but to some category related to it: the category of vector bundles over a space, of finitely generated projective modules over a ring, of locally free modules over a scheme, for instance. Later, Quillen extracted axioms that all these categories satisfy and that allow the Grothendieck construction of K0. The categorical structure he discovered is called today a Quillen-exact category. It led him not only to broaden the domain of application of K-theory, but also to define a whole K-theory spectrum associated to such a category. Waldhausen next generalized Quillen's notion of an exact category by introducing categories with weak equivalences and cofibrations, which one nowadays calls Waldhausen categories. K-theory has since been studied as a functor from the category of suitably structured (Quillen-exact, Waldhausen, symmetric monoidal) small categories to some category of spectra1. This has given rise to a huge field of research, so much so that there is a whole journal devoted to the subject. In this thesis, we want to take advantage of these tools to begin studying K-theory from another perspective. Indeed, we have the impression that, in the generalization of topological and algebraic K-theory that has been started by Quillen, something important has been left aside. K-theory was initiated as a (contravariant) functor from the various categories of spaces, rings, schemes, …, not from the category of Waldhausen small categories. Of course, one obtains information about a ring by studying its Quillen-exact category of (finitely generated projective) modules, but still, the final goal is the study of the ring, and, more globally, of the category of rings. Thus, in a general theory, one should describe a way to associate not only a spectrum to a structured category, but also a structured category to an object. Moreover, this process should take the morphisms of these objects into account. This gives rise to two fundamental questions. What kind of mathematical objects should K-theory be applied to? Given such an object, what category "over it" should one consider and how does it vary over morphisms? Considering examples, we have made the following observations. Suppose C is the category that is to be investigated by means of K-theory, like the category of topological spaces or of schemes, for instance. The category associated to an object of C is a sub-category of the category of modules over some monoid in a monoidal category with additional structure (topological, symmetric, abelian, model). The situation is highly "fibred": not only morphisms of C induce (structured) funct