594 research outputs found
Forward Analysis and Model Checking for Trace Bounded WSTS
We investigate a subclass of well-structured transition systems (WSTS), the
bounded---in the sense of Ginsburg and Spanier (Trans. AMS 1964)---complete
deterministic ones, which we claim provide an adequate basis for the study of
forward analyses as developed by Finkel and Goubault-Larrecq (Logic. Meth.
Comput. Sci. 2012). Indeed, we prove that, unlike other conditions considered
previously for the termination of forward analysis, boundedness is decidable.
Boundedness turns out to be a valuable restriction for WSTS verification, as we
show that it further allows to decide all -regular properties on the
set of infinite traces of the system
Complexity Hierarchies Beyond Elementary
We introduce a hierarchy of fast-growing complexity classes and show its
suitability for completeness statements of many non elementary problems. This
hierarchy allows the classification of many decision problems with a
non-elementary complexity, which occur naturally in logic, combinatorics,
formal languages, verification, etc., with complexities ranging from simple
towers of exponentials to Ackermannian and beyond.Comment: Version 3 is the published version in TOCT 8(1:3), 2016. I will keep
updating the catalogue of problems from Section 6 in future revision
Reachability in Vector Addition Systems is Primitive-Recursive in Fixed Dimension
The reachability problem in vector addition systems is a central question,
not only for the static verification of these systems, but also for many
inter-reducible decision problems occurring in various fields. The currently
best known upper bound on this problem is not primitive-recursive, even when
considering systems of fixed dimension. We provide significant refinements to
the classical decomposition algorithm of Mayr, Kosaraju, and Lambert and to its
termination proof, which yield an ACKERMANN upper bound in the general case,
and primitive-recursive upper bounds in fixed dimension. While this does not
match the currently best known TOWER lower bound for reachability, it is
optimal for related problems
Programmability of Chemical Reaction Networks
Motivated by the intriguing complexity of biochemical circuitry within individual cells we study Stochastic Chemical Reaction Networks (SCRNs), a formal model that considers a set of chemical reactions acting on a finite number of molecules in a well-stirred solution according to standard chemical kinetics equations. SCRNs have been widely used for describing naturally occurring (bio)chemical systems, and with the advent of synthetic biology they become a promising language for the design of artificial biochemical circuits. Our interest here is the computational power of SCRNs and how they relate to more conventional models of computation. We survey known connections and give new connections between SCRNs and Boolean Logic Circuits, Vector Addition Systems, Petri Nets, Gate Implementability, Primitive Recursive Functions, Register Machines, Fractran, and Turing Machines. A theme to these investigations is the thin line between decidable and undecidable questions about SCRN behavior
Algorithmic Verification of Asynchronous Programs
Asynchronous programming is a ubiquitous systems programming idiom to manage
concurrent interactions with the environment. In this style, instead of waiting
for time-consuming operations to complete, the programmer makes a non-blocking
call to the operation and posts a callback task to a task buffer that is
executed later when the time-consuming operation completes. A co-operative
scheduler mediates the interaction by picking and executing callback tasks from
the task buffer to completion (and these callbacks can post further callbacks
to be executed later). Writing correct asynchronous programs is hard because
the use of callbacks, while efficient, obscures program control flow.
We provide a formal model underlying asynchronous programs and study
verification problems for this model. We show that the safety verification
problem for finite-data asynchronous programs is expspace-complete. We show
that liveness verification for finite-data asynchronous programs is decidable
and polynomial-time equivalent to Petri Net reachability. Decidability is not
obvious, since even if the data is finite-state, asynchronous programs
constitute infinite-state transition systems: both the program stack and the
task buffer of pending asynchronous calls can be potentially unbounded.
Our main technical construction is a polynomial-time semantics-preserving
reduction from asynchronous programs to Petri Nets and conversely. The
reduction allows the use of algorithmic techniques on Petri Nets to the
verification of asynchronous programs.
We also study several extensions to the basic models of asynchronous programs
that are inspired by additional capabilities provided by implementations of
asynchronous libraries, and classify the decidability and undecidability of
verification questions on these extensions.Comment: 46 pages, 9 figure
The Reachability Problem for Petri Nets is Not Elementary
Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are a long established
model of concurrency with extensive applications in modelling and analysis of
hardware, software and database systems, as well as chemical, biological and
business processes. The central algorithmic problem for Petri nets is
reachability: whether from the given initial configuration there exists a
sequence of valid execution steps that reaches the given final configuration.
The complexity of the problem has remained unsettled since the 1960s, and it is
one of the most prominent open questions in the theory of verification.
Decidability was proved by Mayr in his seminal STOC 1981 work, and the
currently best published upper bound is non-primitive recursive Ackermannian of
Leroux and Schmitz from LICS 2019. We establish a non-elementary lower bound,
i.e. that the reachability problem needs a tower of exponentials of time and
space. Until this work, the best lower bound has been exponential space, due to
Lipton in 1976. The new lower bound is a major breakthrough for several
reasons. Firstly, it shows that the reachability problem is much harder than
the coverability (i.e., state reachability) problem, which is also ubiquitous
but has been known to be complete for exponential space since the late 1970s.
Secondly, it implies that a plethora of problems from formal languages, logic,
concurrent systems, process calculi and other areas, that are known to admit
reductions from the Petri nets reachability problem, are also not elementary.
Thirdly, it makes obsolete the currently best lower bounds for the reachability
problems for two key extensions of Petri nets: with branching and with a
pushdown stack.Comment: Final version of STOC'1
Recommended from our members
Petri net equivalence
Determining whether two Petri nets are equivalent is an interesting problem from both practical and theoretical standpoints. Although it is undecidable in the general case, for many interesting nets the equivalence problem is solvable. This paper explores, mostly from a theoretical point of view, some of the issues of Petri net equivalence, including both reachability sets and languages. Some new definitions of reachability set equivalence are described which allow the markings of some places to be treated identically or ignored, analogous to the Petri net languages in which multiple transitions may be labeled with the same symbol or with the empty string. The complexity of some decidable Petri net equivalence problems is analyzed
Vector Addition System Reversible Reachability Problem
The reachability problem for vector addition systems is a central problem of
net theory. This problem is known to be decidable but the complexity is still
unknown. Whereas the problem is EXPSPACE-hard, no elementary upper bounds
complexity are known. In this paper we consider the reversible reachability
problem. This problem consists to decide if two configurations are reachable
one from each other, or equivalently if they are in the same strongly connected
component of the reachability graph. We show that this problem is
EXPSPACE-complete. As an application of the introduced materials we
characterize the reversibility domains of a vector addition system
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