417 research outputs found
Determinising Parity Automata
Parity word automata and their determinisation play an important role in
automata and game theory. We discuss a determinisation procedure for
nondeterministic parity automata through deterministic Rabin to deterministic
parity automata. We prove that the intermediate determinisation to Rabin
automata is optimal. We show that the resulting determinisation to parity
automata is optimal up to a small constant. Moreover, the lower bound refers to
the more liberal Streett acceptance. We thus show that determinisation to
Streett would not lead to better bounds than determinisation to parity. As a
side-result, this optimality extends to the determinisation of B\"uchi
automata
An Efficient Normalisation Procedure for Linear Temporal Logic and Very Weak Alternating Automata
In the mid 80s, Lichtenstein, Pnueli, and Zuck proved a classical theorem
stating that every formula of Past LTL (the extension of LTL with past
operators) is equivalent to a formula of the form , where
and contain only past operators. Some years later, Chang,
Manna, and Pnueli built on this result to derive a similar normal form for LTL.
Both normalisation procedures have a non-elementary worst-case blow-up, and
follow an involved path from formulas to counter-free automata to star-free
regular expressions and back to formulas. We improve on both points. We present
a direct and purely syntactic normalisation procedure for LTL yielding a normal
form, comparable to the one by Chang, Manna, and Pnueli, that has only a single
exponential blow-up. As an application, we derive a simple algorithm to
translate LTL into deterministic Rabin automata. The algorithm normalises the
formula, translates it into a special very weak alternating automaton, and
applies a simple determinisation procedure, valid only for these special
automata.Comment: This is the extended version of the referenced conference paper and
contains an appendix with additional materia
Robust Linear Temporal Logic
Although it is widely accepted that every system should be robust, in the
sense that "small" violations of environment assumptions should lead to "small"
violations of system guarantees, it is less clear how to make this intuitive
notion of robustness mathematically precise. In this paper, we address this
problem by developing a robust version of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), which we
call robust LTL and denote by rLTL. Formulas in rLTL are syntactically
identical to LTL formulas but are endowed with a many-valued semantics that
encodes robustness. In particular, the semantics of the rLTL formula is such that a "small" violation of the environment
assumption is guaranteed to only produce a "small" violation of the
system guarantee . In addition to introducing rLTL, we study the
verification and synthesis problems for this logic: similarly to LTL, we show
that both problems are decidable, that the verification problem can be solved
in time exponential in the number of subformulas of the rLTL formula at hand,
and that the synthesis problem can be solved in doubly exponential time
Lazy Probabilistic Model Checking without Determinisation
The bottleneck in the quantitative analysis of Markov chains and Markov
decision processes against specifications given in LTL or as some form of
nondeterministic B\"uchi automata is the inclusion of a determinisation step of
the automaton under consideration. In this paper, we show that full
determinisation can be avoided: subset and breakpoint constructions suffice. We
have implemented our approach---both explicit and symbolic versions---in a
prototype tool. Our experiments show that our prototype can compete with mature
tools like PRISM.Comment: 38 pages. Updated version for introducing the following changes: -
general improvement on paper presentation; - extension of the approach to
avoid full determinisation; - added proofs for such an extension; - added
case studies; - updated old case studies to reflect the added extensio
Index problems for game automata
For a given regular language of infinite trees, one can ask about the minimal
number of priorities needed to recognize this language with a
non-deterministic, alternating, or weak alternating parity automaton. These
questions are known as, respectively, the non-deterministic, alternating, and
weak Rabin-Mostowski index problems. Whether they can be answered effectively
is a long-standing open problem, solved so far only for languages recognizable
by deterministic automata (the alternating variant trivializes).
We investigate a wider class of regular languages, recognizable by so-called
game automata, which can be seen as the closure of deterministic ones under
complementation and composition. Game automata are known to recognize languages
arbitrarily high in the alternating Rabin-Mostowski index hierarchy; that is,
the alternating index problem does not trivialize any more.
Our main contribution is that all three index problems are decidable for
languages recognizable by game automata. Additionally, we show that it is
decidable whether a given regular language can be recognized by a game
automaton
Responsibility and verification: Importance value in temporal logics
We aim at measuring the influence of the nondeterministic choices of a part
of a system on its ability to satisfy a specification. For this purpose, we
apply the concept of Shapley values to verification as a means to evaluate how
important a part of a system is. The importance of a component is measured by
giving its control to an adversary, alone or along with other components, and
testing whether the system can still fulfill the specification. We study this
idea in the framework of model-checking with various classical types of
linear-time specification, and propose several ways to transpose it to
branching ones. We also provide tight complexity bounds in almost every case.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figure
Temporalised Description Logics for Monitoring Partially Observable Events
Inevitably, it becomes more and more important to verify that the systems surrounding us have certain properties. This is indeed unavoidable for safety-critical systems such as power plants and intensive-care units. We refer to the term system in a broad sense: it may be man-made (e.g. a computer system) or natural (e.g. a patient in an intensive-care unit). Whereas in Model Checking it is assumed that one has complete knowledge about the functioning of the system, we consider an open-world scenario and assume that we can only observe the behaviour of the actual running system by sensors. Such an abstract sensor could sense e.g. the blood pressure of a patient or the air traffic observed by radar.
Then the observed data are preprocessed appropriately and stored in a fact base. Based on the data available in the fact base, situation-awareness tools are supposed to help the user to detect certain situations that require intervention by an expert. Such situations could be that the heart-rate of a patient is rather high while the blood pressure is low, or that a collision of two aeroplanes is about to happen.
Moreover, the information in the fact base can be used by monitors to verify that the system has certain properties. It is not realistic, however, to assume that the sensors always yield a complete description of the current state of the observed system. Thus, it makes sense to assume that information that is not present in the fact base is unknown rather than false. Moreover, very often one has some knowledge about the functioning of the system. This background knowledge can be used to draw conclusions about the possible future behaviour of the system. Employing description logics (DLs) is one way to deal with these requirements. In this thesis, we tackle the sketched problem in three different contexts: (i) runtime verification using a temporalised DL, (ii) temporalised query entailment, and (iii) verification in DL-based action formalisms
Strategy Complexity of Parity Objectives in Countable MDPs
We study countably infinite MDPs with parity objectives. Unlike in finite
MDPs, optimal strategies need not exist, and may require infinite memory if
they do. We provide a complete picture of the exact strategy complexity of
-optimal strategies (and optimal strategies, where they exist) for
all subclasses of parity objectives in the Mostowski hierarchy. Either
MD-strategies, Markov strategies, or 1-bit Markov strategies are necessary and
sufficient, depending on the number of colors, the branching degree of the MDP,
and whether one considers -optimal or optimal strategies. In
particular, 1-bit Markov strategies are necessary and sufficient for
-optimal (resp. optimal) strategies for general parity objectives.Comment: This is the full version of a paper presented at CONCUR 202
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