Varieties of Cost Functions.

Regular cost functions were introduced as a quantitative generalisation of regular languages, retaining many of their equivalent characterisations and decidability properties. For instance, stabilisation monoids play the same role for cost functions as monoids do for regular languages. The purpose of this article is to further extend this algebraic approach by generalising two results on regular languages to cost functions: Eilenberg's varieties theorem and profinite equational characterisations of lattices of regular languages. This opens interesting new perspectives, but the specificities of cost functions introduce difficulties that prevent these generalisations to be straightforward. In contrast, although syntactic algebras can be defined for formal power series over a commutative ring, no such notion is known for series over semirings and in particular over the tropical semiring

Weighted Logics for Nested Words and Algebraic Formal Power Series

Nested words, a model for recursive programs proposed by Alur and Madhusudan, have recently gained much interest. In this paper we introduce quantitative extensions and study nested word series which assign to nested words elements of a semiring. We show that regular nested word series coincide with series definable in weighted logics as introduced by Droste and Gastin. For this we establish a connection between nested words and the free bisemigroup. Applying our result, we obtain characterizations of algebraic formal power series in terms of weighted logics. This generalizes results of Lautemann, Schwentick and Therien on context-free languages

Colored operads, series on colored operads, and combinatorial generating systems

We introduce bud generating systems, which are used for combinatorial generation. They specify sets of various kinds of combinatorial objects, called languages. They can emulate context-free grammars, regular tree grammars, and synchronous grammars, allowing us to work with all these generating systems in a unified way. The theory of bud generating systems uses colored operads. Indeed, an object is generated by a bud generating system if it satisfies a certain equation in a colored operad. To compute the generating series of the languages of bud generating systems, we introduce formal power series on colored operads and several operations on these. Series on colored operads are crucial to express the languages specified by bud generating systems and allow us to enumerate combinatorial objects with respect to some statistics. Some examples of bud generating systems are constructed; in particular to specify some sorts of balanced trees and to obtain recursive formulas enumerating these.Comment: 48 page

On transductions of formal power series over complete semirings

AbstractRational and pushdown transductions of formal languages are generalized to formal power series with coefficients in a complete semiring. A characterization similar to Nivat's Theorem is given. Commutativity requirements for the coefficients are especially studied

Séries formelles et algèbres syntactiques

AbstractThe notion of the syntactic monoid is well known to be very important for formal languages, and in particular for rational languages; examples of that importance are Kleene's theorem, Schützenberger's theorem about aperiodic monoid and Eilenberg's theorem about varieties. We introduce here, for formal power series, a similar object: to each formal power series we associate its syntactic algebra. The Kleene-Schützenberger theorem can then be stated in the following way: a series is rational if and only if its syntactic algebra has finite dimension. A rational central series (this means that the coefficient of a word depends only on its conjugacy class) is a linear combination of characters if and only if its syntactic algebra is semisimple. Fatou properties of rational series in one variable are extended to series in several variables and a special case of the rationality of the Hadamard quotient of two series is positively answered. The correspondence between pseudovarieties of finite monoids and varieties of rational languages, as studied by Eilenberg, is extended between pseudovarieties of finite dimensional algebras and varieties of rational series. We study different kinds of varieties that are defined by closure properties and prove a theorem similar to Schützenberger's theorem on aperiodic monoids

Supervisory Control of (max,+) Automata: A Behavioral Approach

A behavioral framework for control of (max,+) automata is proposed. It is based on behaviors (formal power series) and a generalized version of the Hadamard product, which is the behavior of a generalized tensor product of the plant and controller (max,+) automata in their linear representations. In the tensor product and the Hadamard product, the uncontrollable events that can neither be disabled nor delayed are distinguished. Supervisory control of (max,+) automata is then studied using residuation theory applied to our generalization of the Hadamard product of formal power series. This yields a notion of controllability of formal power series as well as (max,+)-counterparts of supremal controllable languages. Finally, rationality as an equivalent condition to realizability of the resulting controller series is discussed together with hints on future use of this approach

Characterizations of recognizable picture series

AbstractThe theory of two-dimensional languages as a generalization of formal string languages was motivated by problems arising from image processing and pattern recognition, and also concerns models of parallel computing. Here we investigate power series on pictures. These are functions that map pictures to elements of a semiring and provide an extension of two-dimensional languages to a quantitative setting. We assign weights to different devices, ranging from picture automata to tiling systems. We will prove that, for commutative semirings, the behaviours of weighted picture automata are precisely alphabetic projections of series defined in terms of rational operations, and also coincide with the families of series characterized by weighted tiling or weighted domino systems