On Termination for Faulty Channel Machines

A channel machine consists of a finite controller together with several fifo channels; the controller can read messages from the head of a channel and write messages to the tail of a channel. In this paper, we focus on channel machines with insertion errors, i.e., machines in whose channels messages can spontaneously appear. Such devices have been previously introduced in the study of Metric Temporal Logic. We consider the termination problem: are all the computations of a given insertion channel machine finite? We show that this problem has non-elementary, yet primitive recursive complexity

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 Parametric Complexity of Lossy Counter Machines

The reachability problem in lossy counter machines is the best-known ACKERMANN-complete problem and has been used to establish most of the ACKERMANN-hardness statements in the literature. This hides however a complexity gap when the number of counters is fixed. We close this gap and prove F_d-completeness for machines with d counters, which provides the first known uncontrived problems complete for the fast-growing complexity classes at levels 3 < d < omega. We develop for this an approach through antichain factorisations of bad sequences and analysing the length of controlled antichains

Verifying nondeterministic probabilistic channel systems against ω\omega-regular linear-time properties

Lossy channel systems (LCSs) are systems of finite state automata that communicate via unreliable unbounded fifo channels. In order to circumvent the undecidability of model checking for nondeterministic LCSs, probabilistic models have been introduced, where it can be decided whether a linear-time property holds almost surely. However, such fully probabilistic systems are not a faithful model of nondeterministic protocols. We study a hybrid model for LCSs where losses of messages are seen as faults occurring with some given probability, and where the internal behavior of the system remains nondeterministic. Thus the semantics is in terms of infinite-state Markov decision processes. The purpose of this article is to discuss the decidability of linear-time properties formalized by formulas of linear temporal logic (LTL). Our focus is on the qualitative setting where one asks, e.g., whether a LTL-formula holds almost surely or with zero probability (in case the formula describes the bad behaviors). Surprisingly, it turns out that -- in contrast to finite-state Markov decision processes -- the satisfaction relation for LTL formulas depends on the chosen type of schedulers that resolve the nondeterminism. While all variants of the qualitative LTL model checking problem for the full class of history-dependent schedulers are undecidable, the same questions for finite-memory scheduler can be solved algorithmically. However, the restriction to reachability properties and special kinds of recurrent reachability properties yields decidable verification problems for the full class of schedulers, which -- for this restricted class of properties -- are as powerful as finite-memory schedulers, or even a subclass of them.Comment: 39 page

Equivalence-Checking on Infinite-State Systems: Techniques and Results

The paper presents a selection of recently developed and/or used techniques for equivalence-checking on infinite-state systems, and an up-to-date overview of existing results (as of September 2004)

Verification of programs with half-duplex communication

AbstractWe consider the analysis of infinite half-duplex systems made of finite state machines that communicate over unbounded channels. The half-duplex property for two machines and two channels (one in each direction) says that each reachable configuration has at most one channel non-empty. We prove in this paper that such half-duplex systems have a recognizable reachability set. We show how to compute, in polynomial time, a symbolic representation of this reachability set and how to use that description to solve several verification problems. Furthermore, though the model of communicating finite state machines is Turing-powerful, we prove that membership of the class of half-duplex systems is decidable. Unfortunately, the natural generalization to systems with more than two machines is Turing-powerful. We also prove that the model-checking of those systems against PLTL (Propositional Linear Temporal Logic) or CTL (Computational Tree Logic) is undecidable. Finally, we show how to apply the previous decidability results to the Regular Model Checking. We propose a new symbolic reachability semi-algorithm with accelerations which successfully terminates on half-duplex systems of two machines and some interesting non-half-duplex systems