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

Further Results on Partial Order Equivalences on Infinite Systems

In [26], we investigated decidability issues for standard language equivalence for process description languages with two generalisations based on traditional approachesfor capturing non-interleaving behaviour: pomset equivalence reflecting global causal dependency, and location equivalence reflecting spatial distribution of events. In this paper, we continue by investigating the role played by TCSP-style renaming and hiding combinators with respect to decidability. One result of [26] was that in contrast to pomset equivalence, location equivalence remained decidable for a class of processes consisting of finite sets of BPP processes communicating in a TCSP manner. Here, we show that location equivalence becomes undecidable when either renaming or hiding is added to this class of processes. Furthermore, we investigate the weak versions of location and pomset equivalences.We show that for BPP with prefixing, both weak pomset and weak location equivalence are decidable. Moreover, we show that weak location equivalence is undecidable for BPP semantically extended with CCS communication