Semigroups Arising From Asynchronous Automata

We introduce a new class of semigroups arising from a restricted class of asynchronous automata. We call these semigroups "expanding automaton semigroups." We show that the class of synchronous automaton semigroups is strictly contained in the class of expanding automaton semigroups, and that the class of expanding automaton semigroups is strictly contained in the class of asynchronous automaton semigroups. We investigate the dynamics of expanding automaton semigroups acting on regular rooted trees, and show that undecidability arises in these actions. We show that this class is not closed under taking normal ideal extensions, but the class of asynchronous automaton semigroups is closed under taking these extensions. We construct every free partially commutative monoid as a synchronous automaton semigroup.Comment: 31 pages, 4 figure

A Survey of Cellular Automata: Types, Dynamics, Non-uniformity and Applications

Cellular automata (CAs) are dynamical systems which exhibit complex global behavior from simple local interaction and computation. Since the inception of cellular automaton (CA) by von Neumann in 1950s, it has attracted the attention of several researchers over various backgrounds and fields for modelling different physical, natural as well as real-life phenomena. Classically, CAs are uniform. However, non-uniformity has also been introduced in update pattern, lattice structure, neighborhood dependency and local rule. In this survey, we tour to the various types of CAs introduced till date, the different characterization tools, the global behaviors of CAs, like universality, reversibility, dynamics etc. Special attention is given to non-uniformity in CAs and especially to non-uniform elementary CAs, which have been very useful in solving several real-life problems.Comment: 43 pages; Under review in Natural Computin

Polynomial Synthesis of Asynchronous Automata

Zielonka's theorem shows that each regular set of Mazurkiewicz traces can be implemented as a system of synchronized processes with a distributed control structure called asynchronous automaton. This paper gives a polynomial algorithm for the synthesis of a non-deterministic asynchronous automaton from a regular Mazurkiewicz trace language. This new construction is based on an unfolding approach that improves the complexity of Zielonka's and Pighizzini's techniques in terms of the number of states.Comment: The MOdelling and VErification (MOVE) tea

On the Control of Asynchronous Automata

The decidability of the distributed version of the Ramadge and Wonham controller synthesis problem,where both the plant and the controllers are modeled as asynchronous automataand the controllers have causal memoryis a challenging open problem.There exist three classes of plants for which the existence of a correct controller with causal memory has been shown decidable: when the dependency graph of actions is series-parallel, when the processes are connectedly communicating and when the dependency graph of processes is a tree. We design a class of plants, called decomposable games, with a decidable controller synthesis problem.This provides a unified proof of the three existing decidability results as well as new examples of decidable plants

Consensus using Asynchronous Failure Detectors

The FLP result shows that crash-tolerant consensus is impossible to solve in asynchronous systems, and several solutions have been proposed for crash-tolerant consensus under alternative (stronger) models. One popular approach is to augment the asynchronous system with appropriate failure detectors, which provide (potentially unreliable) information about process crashes in the system, to circumvent the FLP impossibility. In this paper, we demonstrate the exact mechanism by which (sufficiently powerful) asynchronous failure detectors enable solving crash-tolerant consensus. Our approach, which borrows arguments from the FLP impossibility proof and the famous result from CHT, which shows that $\Omega$ is a weakest failure detector to solve consensus, also yields a natural proof to $\Omega$ as a weakest asynchronous failure detector to solve consensus. The use of I/O automata theory in our approach enables us to model execution in a more detailed fashion than CHT and also addresses the latent assumptions and assertions in the original result in CHT

Asynchronous Games over Tree Architectures

We consider the task of controlling in a distributed way a Zielonka asynchronous automaton. Every process of a controller has access to its causal past to determine the next set of actions it proposes to play. An action can be played only if every process controlling this action proposes to play it. We consider reachability objectives: every process should reach its set of final states. We show that this control problem is decidable for tree architectures, where every process can communicate with its parent, its children, and with the environment. The complexity of our algorithm is l-fold exponential with l being the height of the tree representing the architecture. We show that this is unavoidable by showing that even for three processes the problem is EXPTIME-complete, and that it is non-elementary in general