Bounds on the Automata Size for Presburger Arithmetic

Automata provide a decision procedure for Presburger arithmetic. However, until now only crude lower and upper bounds were known on the sizes of the automata produced by this approach. In this paper, we prove an upper bound on the the number of states of the minimal deterministic automaton for a Presburger arithmetic formula. This bound depends on the length of the formula and the quantifiers occurring in the formula. The upper bound is established by comparing the automata for Presburger arithmetic formulas with the formulas produced by a quantifier elimination method. We also show that our bound is tight, even for nondeterministic automata. Moreover, we provide optimal automata constructions for linear equations and inequations

On the Use of Quasiorders in Formal Language Theory

In this thesis we use quasiorders on words to offer a new perspective on two well-studied problems from Formal Language Theory: deciding language inclusion and manipulating the finite automata representations of regular languages. First, we present a generic quasiorder-based framework that, when instantiated with different quasiorders, yields different algorithms (some of them new) for deciding language inclusion. We then instantiate this framework to devise an efficient algorithm for searching with regular expressions on grammar-compressed text. Finally, we define a framework of quasiorder-based automata constructions to offer a new perspective on residual automata.Comment: PhD thesi