135 research outputs found
On the Expressive Power of 2-Stack Visibly Pushdown Automata
Visibly pushdown automata are input-driven pushdown automata that recognize
some non-regular context-free languages while preserving the nice closure and
decidability properties of finite automata. Visibly pushdown automata with
multiple stacks have been considered recently by La Torre, Madhusudan, and
Parlato, who exploit the concept of visibility further to obtain a rich
automata class that can even express properties beyond the class of
context-free languages. At the same time, their automata are closed under
boolean operations, have a decidable emptiness and inclusion problem, and enjoy
a logical characterization in terms of a monadic second-order logic over words
with an additional nesting structure. These results require a restricted
version of visibly pushdown automata with multiple stacks whose behavior can be
split up into a fixed number of phases. In this paper, we consider 2-stack
visibly pushdown automata (i.e., visibly pushdown automata with two stacks) in
their unrestricted form. We show that they are expressively equivalent to the
existential fragment of monadic second-order logic. Furthermore, it turns out
that monadic second-order quantifier alternation forms an infinite hierarchy
wrt words with multiple nestings. Combining these results, we conclude that
2-stack visibly pushdown automata are not closed under complementation.
Finally, we discuss the expressive power of B\"{u}chi 2-stack visibly pushdown
automata running on infinite (nested) words. Extending the logic by an infinity
quantifier, we can likewise establish equivalence to existential monadic
second-order logic
Visibly Linear Dynamic Logic
We introduce Visibly Linear Dynamic Logic (VLDL), which extends Linear
Temporal Logic (LTL) by temporal operators that are guarded by visibly pushdown
languages over finite words. In VLDL one can, e.g., express that a function
resets a variable to its original value after its execution, even in the
presence of an unbounded number of intermediate recursive calls. We prove that
VLDL describes exactly the -visibly pushdown languages. Thus it is
strictly more expressive than LTL and able to express recursive properties of
programs with unbounded call stacks.
The main technical contribution of this work is a translation of VLDL into
-visibly pushdown automata of exponential size via one-way alternating
jumping automata. This translation yields exponential-time algorithms for
satisfiability, validity, and model checking. We also show that visibly
pushdown games with VLDL winning conditions are solvable in triply-exponential
time. We prove all these problems to be complete for their respective
complexity classes.Comment: 25 Page
Two-Way Visibly Pushdown Automata and Transducers
Automata-logic connections are pillars of the theory of regular languages.
Such connections are harder to obtain for transducers, but important results
have been obtained recently for word-to-word transformations, showing that the
three following models are equivalent: deterministic two-way transducers,
monadic second-order (MSO) transducers, and deterministic one-way automata
equipped with a finite number of registers. Nested words are words with a
nesting structure, allowing to model unranked trees as their depth-first-search
linearisations. In this paper, we consider transformations from nested words to
words, allowing in particular to produce unranked trees if output words have a
nesting structure. The model of visibly pushdown transducers allows to describe
such transformations, and we propose a simple deterministic extension of this
model with two-way moves that has the following properties: i) it is a simple
computational model, that naturally has a good evaluation complexity; ii) it is
expressive: it subsumes nested word-to-word MSO transducers, and the exact
expressiveness of MSO transducers is recovered using a simple syntactic
restriction; iii) it has good algorithmic/closure properties: the model is
closed under composition with a unambiguous one-way letter-to-letter transducer
which gives closure under regular look-around, and has a decidable equivalence
problem
Event-Clock Nested Automata
In this paper we introduce and study Event-Clock Nested Automata (ECNA), a
formalism that combines Event Clock Automata (ECA) and Visibly Pushdown
Automata (VPA). ECNA allow to express real-time properties over non-regular
patterns of recursive programs. We prove that ECNA retain the same closure and
decidability properties of ECA and VPA being closed under Boolean operations
and having a decidable language-inclusion problem. In particular, we prove that
emptiness, universality, and language-inclusion for ECNA are EXPTIME-complete
problems. As for the expressiveness, we have that ECNA properly extend any
previous attempt in the literature of combining ECA and VPA
Verification for Timed Automata extended with Unbounded Discrete Data Structures
We study decidability of verification problems for timed automata extended
with unbounded discrete data structures. More detailed, we extend timed
automata with a pushdown stack. In this way, we obtain a strong model that may
for instance be used to model real-time programs with procedure calls. It is
long known that the reachability problem for this model is decidable. The goal
of this paper is to identify subclasses of timed pushdown automata for which
the language inclusion problem and related problems are decidable
Beyond Language Equivalence on Visibly Pushdown Automata
We study (bi)simulation-like preorder/equivalence checking on the class of
visibly pushdown automata and its natural subclasses visibly BPA (Basic Process
Algebra) and visibly one-counter automata. We describe generic methods for
proving complexity upper and lower bounds for a number of studied preorders and
equivalences like simulation, completed simulation, ready simulation, 2-nested
simulation preorders/equivalences and bisimulation equivalence. Our main
results are that all the mentioned equivalences and preorders are
EXPTIME-complete on visibly pushdown automata, PSPACE-complete on visibly
one-counter automata and P-complete on visibly BPA. Our PSPACE lower bound for
visibly one-counter automata improves also the previously known DP-hardness
results for ordinary one-counter automata and one-counter nets. Finally, we
study regularity checking problems for visibly pushdown automata and show that
they can be decided in polynomial time.Comment: Final version of paper, accepted by LMC
On Functionality of Visibly Pushdown Transducers
Visibly pushdown transducers form a subclass of pushdown transducers that
(strictly) extends finite state transducers with a stack. Like visibly pushdown
automata, the input symbols determine the stack operations. In this paper, we
prove that functionality is decidable in PSpace for visibly pushdown
transducers. The proof is done via a pumping argument: if a word with two
outputs has a sufficiently large nesting depth, there exists a nested word with
two outputs whose nesting depth is strictly smaller. The proof uses technics of
word combinatorics. As a consequence of decidability of functionality, we also
show that equivalence of functional visibly pushdown transducers is
Exptime-Complete.Comment: 20 page
Extended Computation Tree Logic
We introduce a generic extension of the popular branching-time logic CTL
which refines the temporal until and release operators with formal languages.
For instance, a language may determine the moments along a path that an until
property may be fulfilled. We consider several classes of languages leading to
logics with different expressive power and complexity, whose importance is
motivated by their use in model checking, synthesis, abstract interpretation,
etc.
We show that even with context-free languages on the until operator the logic
still allows for polynomial time model-checking despite the significant
increase in expressive power. This makes the logic a promising candidate for
applications in verification.
In addition, we analyse the complexity of satisfiability and compare the
expressive power of these logics to CTL* and extensions of PDL
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