1,935 research outputs found
Can Nondeterminism Help Complementation?
Complementation and determinization are two fundamental notions in automata
theory. The close relationship between the two has been well observed in the
literature. In the case of nondeterministic finite automata on finite words
(NFA), complementation and determinization have the same state complexity,
namely Theta(2^n) where n is the state size. The same similarity between
determinization and complementation was found for Buchi automata, where both
operations were shown to have 2^\Theta(n lg n) state complexity. An intriguing
question is whether there exists a type of omega-automata whose determinization
is considerably harder than its complementation. In this paper, we show that
for all common types of omega-automata, the determinization problem has the
same state complexity as the corresponding complementation problem at the
granularity of 2^\Theta(.).Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2012, arXiv:1210.202
Automata with Nested Pebbles Capture First-Order Logic with Transitive Closure
String languages recognizable in (deterministic) log-space are characterized
either by two-way (deterministic) multi-head automata, or following Immerman,
by first-order logic with (deterministic) transitive closure. Here we elaborate
this result, and match the number of heads to the arity of the transitive
closure. More precisely, first-order logic with k-ary deterministic transitive
closure has the same power as deterministic automata walking on their input
with k heads, additionally using a finite set of nested pebbles. This result is
valid for strings, ordered trees, and in general for families of graphs having
a fixed automaton that can be used to traverse the nodes of each of the graphs
in the family. Other examples of such families are grids, toruses, and
rectangular mazes. For nondeterministic automata, the logic is restricted to
positive occurrences of transitive closure.
The special case of k=1 for trees, shows that single-head deterministic
tree-walking automata with nested pebbles are characterized by first-order
logic with unary deterministic transitive closure. This refines our earlier
result that placed these automata between first-order and monadic second-order
logic on trees.Comment: Paper for Logical Methods in Computer Science, 27 pages, 1 figur
Generalizing input-driven languages: theoretical and practical benefits
Regular languages (RL) are the simplest family in Chomsky's hierarchy. Thanks
to their simplicity they enjoy various nice algebraic and logic properties that
have been successfully exploited in many application fields. Practically all of
their related problems are decidable, so that they support automatic
verification algorithms. Also, they can be recognized in real-time.
Context-free languages (CFL) are another major family well-suited to
formalize programming, natural, and many other classes of languages; their
increased generative power w.r.t. RL, however, causes the loss of several
closure properties and of the decidability of important problems; furthermore
they need complex parsing algorithms. Thus, various subclasses thereof have
been defined with different goals, spanning from efficient, deterministic
parsing to closure properties, logic characterization and automatic
verification techniques.
Among CFL subclasses, so-called structured ones, i.e., those where the
typical tree-structure is visible in the sentences, exhibit many of the
algebraic and logic properties of RL, whereas deterministic CFL have been
thoroughly exploited in compiler construction and other application fields.
After surveying and comparing the main properties of those various language
families, we go back to operator precedence languages (OPL), an old family
through which R. Floyd pioneered deterministic parsing, and we show that they
offer unexpected properties in two fields so far investigated in totally
independent ways: they enable parsing parallelization in a more effective way
than traditional sequential parsers, and exhibit the same algebraic and logic
properties so far obtained only for less expressive language families
Adaptive testing of a deterministic implementation against a nondeterministic finite state machine
A number of authors have looked at the problem of deriving a checking experiment from a nondeterministic finite state machine that models the required behaviour of a system. We show that these methods can be extended if it is known that the implementation is equivalent to some (unknown) deterministic finite state machine. When testing a deterministic implementation, the test output provides information about the implementation under test and can thus guide future testing. The use of an adaptive test process is thus proposed
Attack-Resilient Supervisory Control of Discrete-Event Systems
In this work, we study the problem of supervisory control of discrete-event
systems (DES) in the presence of attacks that tamper with inputs and outputs of
the plant. We consider a very general system setup as we focus on both
deterministic and nondeterministic plants that we model as finite state
transducers (FSTs); this also covers the conventional approach to modeling DES
as deterministic finite automata. Furthermore, we cover a wide class of attacks
that can nondeterministically add, remove, or rewrite a sensing and/or
actuation word to any word from predefined regular languages, and show how such
attacks can be modeled by nondeterministic FSTs; we also present how the use of
FSTs facilitates modeling realistic (and very complex) attacks, as well as
provides the foundation for design of attack-resilient supervisory controllers.
Specifically, we first consider the supervisory control problem for
deterministic plants with attacks (i) only on their sensors, (ii) only on their
actuators, and (iii) both on their sensors and actuators. For each case, we
develop new conditions for controllability in the presence of attacks, as well
as synthesizing algorithms to obtain FST-based description of such
attack-resilient supervisors. A derived resilient controller provides a set of
all safe control words that can keep the plant work desirably even in the
presence of corrupted observation and/or if the control words are subjected to
actuation attacks. Then, we extend the controllability theorems and the
supervisor synthesizing algorithms to nondeterministic plants that satisfy a
nonblocking condition. Finally, we illustrate applicability of our methodology
on several examples and numerical case-studies
Analysis of Timed and Long-Run Objectives for Markov Automata
Markov automata (MAs) extend labelled transition systems with random delays
and probabilistic branching. Action-labelled transitions are instantaneous and
yield a distribution over states, whereas timed transitions impose a random
delay governed by an exponential distribution. MAs are thus a nondeterministic
variation of continuous-time Markov chains. MAs are compositional and are used
to provide a semantics for engineering frameworks such as (dynamic) fault
trees, (generalised) stochastic Petri nets, and the Architecture Analysis &
Design Language (AADL). This paper considers the quantitative analysis of MAs.
We consider three objectives: expected time, long-run average, and timed
(interval) reachability. Expected time objectives focus on determining the
minimal (or maximal) expected time to reach a set of states. Long-run
objectives determine the fraction of time to be in a set of states when
considering an infinite time horizon. Timed reachability objectives are about
computing the probability to reach a set of states within a given time
interval. This paper presents the foundations and details of the algorithms and
their correctness proofs. We report on several case studies conducted using a
prototypical tool implementation of the algorithms, driven by the MAPA
modelling language for efficiently generating MAs.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1305.705
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