Adaptable processes

We propose the concept of adaptable processes as a way of overcoming the limitations that process calculi have for describing patterns of dynamic process evolution. Such patterns rely on direct ways of controlling the behavior and location of running processes, and so they are at the heart of the adaptation capabilities present in many modern concurrent systems. Adaptable processes have a location and are sensible to actions of dynamic update at runtime; this allows to express a wide range of evolvability patterns for concurrent processes. We introduce a core calculus of adaptable processes and propose two verification problems for them: bounded and eventual adaptation. While the former ensures that the number of consecutive erroneous states that can be traversed during a computation is bound by some given number k, the latter ensures that if the system enters into a state with errors then a state without errors will be eventually reached. We study the (un)decidability of these two problems in several variants of the calculus, which result from considering dynamic and static topologies of adaptable processes as well as different evolvability patterns. Rather than a specification language, our calculus intends to be a basis for investigating the fundamental properties of evolvable processes and for developing richer languages with evolvability capabilities

Complexity Hierarchies Beyond Elementary

We introduce a hierarchy of fast-growing complexity classes and show its suitability for completeness statements of many non elementary problems. This hierarchy allows the classification of many decision problems with a non-elementary complexity, which occur naturally in logic, combinatorics, formal languages, verification, etc., with complexities ranging from simple towers of exponentials to Ackermannian and beyond.Comment: Version 3 is the published version in TOCT 8(1:3), 2016. I will keep updating the catalogue of problems from Section 6 in future revision

The Reachability Problem for Petri Nets is Not Elementary

Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are a long established model of concurrency with extensive applications in modelling and analysis of hardware, software and database systems, as well as chemical, biological and business processes. The central algorithmic problem for Petri nets is reachability: whether from the given initial configuration there exists a sequence of valid execution steps that reaches the given final configuration. The complexity of the problem has remained unsettled since the 1960s, and it is one of the most prominent open questions in the theory of verification. Decidability was proved by Mayr in his seminal STOC 1981 work, and the currently best published upper bound is non-primitive recursive Ackermannian of Leroux and Schmitz from LICS 2019. We establish a non-elementary lower bound, i.e. that the reachability problem needs a tower of exponentials of time and space. Until this work, the best lower bound has been exponential space, due to Lipton in 1976. The new lower bound is a major breakthrough for several reasons. Firstly, it shows that the reachability problem is much harder than the coverability (i.e., state reachability) problem, which is also ubiquitous but has been known to be complete for exponential space since the late 1970s. Secondly, it implies that a plethora of problems from formal languages, logic, concurrent systems, process calculi and other areas, that are known to admit reductions from the Petri nets reachability problem, are also not elementary. Thirdly, it makes obsolete the currently best lower bounds for the reachability problems for two key extensions of Petri nets: with branching and with a pushdown stack.Comment: Final version of STOC'1

Petri net equivalence

Determining whether two Petri nets are equivalent is an interesting problem from both practical and theoretical standpoints. Although it is undecidable in the general case, for many interesting nets the equivalence problem is solvable. This paper explores, mostly from a theoretical point of view, some of the issues of Petri net equivalence, including both reachability sets and languages. Some new definitions of reachability set equivalence are described which allow the markings of some places to be treated identically or ignored, analogous to the Petri net languages in which multiple transitions may be labeled with the same symbol or with the empty string. The complexity of some decidable Petri net equivalence problems is analyzed

Forward Analysis for WSTS, Part III: Karp-Miller Trees

This paper is a sequel of "Forward Analysis for WSTS, Part I: Completions" [STACS 2009, LZI Intl. Proc. in Informatics 3, 433-444] and "Forward Analysis for WSTS, Part II: Complete WSTS" [Logical Methods in Computer Science 8(3), 2012]. In these two papers, we provided a framework to conduct forward reachability analyses of WSTS, using finite representations of downward-closed sets. We further develop this framework to obtain a generic Karp-Miller algorithm for the new class of very-WSTS. This allows us to show that coverability sets of very-WSTS can be computed as their finite ideal decompositions. Under natural effectiveness assumptions, we also show that LTL model checking for very-WSTS is decidable. The termination of our procedure rests on a new notion of acceleration levels, which we study. We characterize those domains that allow for only finitely many accelerations, based on ordinal ranks

Ackermannian and Primitive-Recursive Bounds with Dickson's Lemma

Dickson's Lemma is a simple yet powerful tool widely used in termination proofs, especially when dealing with counters or related data structures. However, most computer scientists do not know how to derive complexity upper bounds from such termination proofs, and the existing literature is not very helpful in these matters. We propose a new analysis of the length of bad sequences over (N^k,\leq) and explain how one may derive complexity upper bounds from termination proofs. Our upper bounds improve earlier results and are essentially tight

Analysis of Petri Nets with Context-Free Structure Changes

Structure-changing Petri nets are Petri nets with transition replacement rules. In this paper, we investigate the restricted class of structure-changing workflow nets and show that two different reachability properties (concrete and abstract reachability) and word membership in the language of labelled firing sequences are decidable, while a language-based notion of correctness (containment of the language of labelled firing sequences in a regular language) is undecidable

On Functions Weakly Computable by Pushdown Petri Nets and Related Systems

We consider numerical functions weakly computable by grammar-controlled vector addition systems (GVASes, a variant of pushdown Petri nets). GVASes can weakly compute all fast growing functions $F_\alpha$ for $\alpha<\omega^\omega$, hence they are computationally more powerful than standard vector addition systems. On the other hand they cannot weakly compute the inverses $F_\alpha^{-1}$ or indeed any sublinear function. The proof relies on a pumping lemma for runs of GVASes that is of independent interest