Weak Alternating Timed Automata

Alternating timed automata on infinite words are considered. The main result is a characterization of acceptance conditions for which the emptiness problem for these automata is decidable. This result implies new decidability results for fragments of timed temporal logics. It is also shown that, unlike for MITL, the characterisation remains the same even if no punctual constraints are allowed

Exploiting the Temporal Logic Hierarchy and the Non-Confluence Property for Efficient LTL Synthesis

The classic approaches to synthesize a reactive system from a linear temporal logic (LTL) specification first translate the given LTL formula to an equivalent omega-automaton and then compute a winning strategy for the corresponding omega-regular game. To this end, the obtained omega-automata have to be (pseudo)-determinized where typically a variant of Safra's determinization procedure is used. In this paper, we show that this determinization step can be significantly improved for tool implementations by replacing Safra's determinization by simpler determinization procedures. In particular, we exploit (1) the temporal logic hierarchy that corresponds to the well-known automata hierarchy consisting of safety, liveness, Buechi, and co-Buechi automata as well as their boolean closures, (2) the non-confluence property of omega-automata that result from certain translations of LTL formulas, and (3) symbolic implementations of determinization procedures for the Rabin-Scott and the Miyano-Hayashi breakpoint construction. In particular, we present convincing experimental results that demonstrate the practical applicability of our new synthesis procedure

The \mu-Calculus Alternation Hierarchy Collapses over Structures with Restricted Connectivity

It is known that the alternation hierarchy of least and greatest fixpoint operators in the mu-calculus is strict. However, the strictness of the alternation hierarchy does not necessarily carry over when considering restricted classes of structures. A prominent instance is the class of infinite words over which the alternation-free fragment is already as expressive as the full mu-calculus. Our current understanding of when and why the mu-calculus alternation hierarchy is not strict is limited. This paper makes progress in answering these questions by showing that the alternation hierarchy of the mu-calculus collapses to the alternation-free fragment over some classes of structures, including infinite nested words and finite graphs with feedback vertex sets of a bounded size. Common to these classes is that the connectivity between the components in a structure from such a class is restricted in the sense that the removal of certain vertices from the structure's graph decomposes it into graphs in which all paths are of finite length. Our collapse results are obtained in an automata-theoretic setting. They subsume, generalize, and strengthen several prior results on the expressivity of the mu-calculus over restricted classes of structures.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2012, arXiv:1210.202

On Pebble Automata for Data Languages with Decidable Emptiness Problem

In this paper we study a subclass of pebble automata (PA) for data languages for which the emptiness problem is decidable. Namely, we introduce the so-called top view weak PA. Roughly speaking, top view weak PA are weak PA where the equality test is performed only between the data values seen by the two most recently placed pebbles. The emptiness problem for this model is decidable. We also show that it is robust: alternating, nondeterministic and deterministic top view weak PA have the same recognition power. Moreover, this model is strong enough to accept all data languages expressible in Linear Temporal Logic with the future-time operators, augmented with one register freeze quantifier.Comment: An extended abstract of this work has been published in the proceedings of the 34th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS) 2009}, Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5734, pages 712-72

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

Weak MSO: Automata and Expressiveness Modulo Bisimilarity

We prove that the bisimulation-invariant fragment of weak monadic second-order logic (WMSO) is equivalent to the fragment of the modal $\mu$-calculus where the application of the least fixpoint operator $\mu p.\varphi$ is restricted to formulas $\varphi$ that are continuous in $p$. Our proof is automata-theoretic in nature; in particular, we introduce a class of automata characterizing the expressive power of WMSO over tree models of arbitrary branching degree. The transition map of these automata is defined in terms of a logic $\mathrm{FOE}_1^\infty$ that is the extension of first-order logic with a generalized quantifier $\exists^\infty$, where $\exists^\infty x. \phi$ means that there are infinitely many objects satisfying $\phi$. An important part of our work consists of a model-theoretic analysis of $\mathrm{FOE}_1^\infty$.Comment: Technical Report, 57 page

Tight Upper Bounds for Streett and Parity Complementation

Complementation of finite automata on infinite words is not only a fundamental problem in automata theory, but also serves as a cornerstone for solving numerous decision problems in mathematical logic, model-checking, program analysis and verification. For Streett complementation, a significant gap exists between the current lower bound $2^{\Omega(n\lg nk)}$ and upper bound $2^{O(nk\lg nk)}$, where $n$ is the state size, $k$ is the number of Streett pairs, and $k$ can be as large as $2^{n}$. Determining the complexity of Streett complementation has been an open question since the late '80s. In this paper show a complementation construction with upper bound $2^{O(n \lg n+nk \lg k)}$ for $k = O(n)$ and $2^{O(n^{2} \lg n)}$ for $k = \omega(n)$, which matches well the lower bound obtained in \cite{CZ11a}. We also obtain a tight upper bound $2^{O(n \lg n)}$ for parity complementation.Comment: Corrected typos. 23 pages, 3 figures. To appear in the 20th Conference on Computer Science Logic (CSL 2011

State of B\"uchi Complementation

Complementation of B\"uchi automata has been studied for over five decades since the formalism was introduced in 1960. Known complementation constructions can be classified into Ramsey-based, determinization-based, rank-based, and slice-based approaches. Regarding the performance of these approaches, there have been several complexity analyses but very few experimental results. What especially lacks is a comparative experiment on all of the four approaches to see how they perform in practice. In this paper, we review the four approaches, propose several optimization heuristics, and perform comparative experimentation on four representative constructions that are considered the most efficient in each approach. The experimental results show that (1) the determinization-based Safra-Piterman construction outperforms the other three in producing smaller complements and finishing more tasks in the allocated time and (2) the proposed heuristics substantially improve the Safra-Piterman and the slice-based constructions.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figures, a preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Implementation and Application of Automata (CIAA

Weak MSO+U with Path Quantifiers over Infinite Trees

This paper shows that over infinite trees, satisfiability is decidable for weak monadic second-order logic extended by the unbounding quantifier U and quantification over infinite paths. The proof is by reduction to emptiness for a certain automaton model, while emptiness for the automaton model is decided using profinite trees.Comment: version of an ICALP 2014 paper with appendice

An expressive completeness theorem for coalgebraic modal mu-calculi

Generalizing standard monadic second-order logic for Kripke models, we introduce monadic second-order logic interpreted over coalgebras for an arbitrary set functor. We then consider invariance under behavioral equivalence of MSO-formulas. More specifically, we investigate whether the coalgebraic mu-calculus is the bisimulation-invariant fragment of the monadic second-order language for a given functor. Using automatatheoretic techniques and building on recent results by the third author, we show that in order to provide such a characterization result it suffices to find what we call an adequate uniform construction for the coalgebraic type functor. As direct applications of this result we obtain a partly new proof of the Janin-Walukiewicz Theorem for the modal mu-calculus, avoiding the use of syntactic normal forms, and bisimulation invariance results for the bag functor (graded modal logic) and all exponential polynomial functors (including the "game functor"). As a more involved application, involving additional non-trivial ideas, we also derive a characterization theorem for the monotone modal mu-calculus, with respect to a natural monadic second-order language for monotone neighborhood models.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1501.0721