1,191 research outputs found

    Nested Weighted Limit-Average Automata of Bounded Width

    Get PDF
    While weighted automata provide a natural framework to express quantitative properties, many basic properties like average response time cannot be expressed with weighted automata. Nested weighted automata extend weighted automata and consist of a master automaton and a set of slave automata that are invoked by the master automaton. Nested weighted automata are strictly more expressive than weighted automata (e.g., average response time can be expressed with nested weighted automata), but the basic decision questions have higher complexity (e.g., for deterministic automata, the emptiness question for nested weighted automata is PSPACE-hard, whereas the corresponding complexity for weighted automata is PTIME). We consider a natural subclass of nested weighted automata where at any point at most a bounded number k of slave automata can be active. We focus on automata whose master value function is the limit average. We show that these nested weighted automata with bounded width are strictly more expressive than weighted automata (e.g., average response time with no overlapping requests can be expressed with bound k=1, but not with non-nested weighted automata). We show that the complexity of the basic decision problems (i.e., emptiness and universality) for the subclass with k constant matches the complexity for weighted automata. Moreover, when k is part of the input given in unary we establish PSPACE-completeness

    Bidirectional Nested Weighted Automata

    Get PDF
    Nested weighted automata (NWA) present a robust and convenient automata-theoretic formalism for quantitative specifications. Previous works have considered NWA that processed input words only in the forward direction. It is natural to allow the automata to process input words backwards as well, for example, to measure the maximal or average time between a response and the preceding request. We therefore introduce and study bidirectional NWA that can process input words in both directions. First, we show that bidirectional NWA can express interesting quantitative properties that are not expressible by forward-only NWA. Second, for the fundamental decision problems of emptiness and universality, we establish decidability and complexity results for the new framework which match the best-known results for the special case of forward-only NWA. Thus, for NWA, the increased expressiveness of bidirectionality is achieved at no additional computational complexity. This is in stark contrast to the unweighted case, where bidirectional finite automata are no more expressive but exponentially more succinct than their forward-only counterparts

    IST Austria Technical Report

    Get PDF
    Recently there has been a significant effort to add quantitative properties in formal verification and synthesis. While weighted automata over finite and infinite words provide a natural and flexible framework to express quantitative properties, perhaps surprisingly, several basic system properties such as average response time cannot be expressed with weighted automata. In this work, we introduce nested weighted automata as a new formalism for expressing important quantitative properties such as average response time. We establish an almost complete decidability picture for the basic decision problems for nested weighted automata, and illustrate its applicability in several domains

    LNCS

    Get PDF
    Responsiveness—the requirement that every request to a system be eventually handled—is one of the fundamental liveness properties of a reactive system. Average response time is a quantitative measure for the responsiveness requirement used commonly in performance evaluation. We show how average response time can be computed on state-transition graphs, on Markov chains, and on game graphs. In all three cases, we give polynomial-time algorithms

    Weighted Automata and Logics on Hierarchical Structures and Graphs

    Get PDF
    Formal language theory, originally developed to model and study our natural spoken languages, is nowadays also put to use in many other fields. These include, but are not limited to, the definition and visualization of programming languages and the examination and verification of algorithms and systems. Formal languages are instrumental in proving the correct behavior of automated systems, e.g., to avoid that a flight guidance system navigates two airplanes too close to each other. This vast field of applications is built upon a very well investigated and coherent theoretical basis. It is the goal of this dissertation to add to this theoretical foundation and to explore ways to make formal languages and their models more expressive. More specifically, we are interested in models that are able to model quantitative features of the behavior of systems. To this end, we define and characterize weighted automata over structures with hierarchical information and over graphs. In particular, we study infinite nested words, operator precedence languages, and finite and infinite graphs. We show BĂĽchi-like results connecting weighted automata and weighted monadic second order (MSO) logic for the respective classes of weighted languages over these structures. As special cases, we obtain BĂĽchi-type equivalence results known from the recent literature for weighted automata and weighted logics on words, trees, pictures, and nested words. Establishing such a general result for graphs has been an open problem for weighted logics for some time. We conjecture that our techniques can be applied to derive similar equivalence results in other contexts like traces, texts, and distributed systems

    35th Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science: STACS 2018, February 28-March 3, 2018, Caen, France

    Get PDF
    • …
    corecore