6,153 research outputs found
Index problems for game automata
For a given regular language of infinite trees, one can ask about the minimal
number of priorities needed to recognize this language with a
non-deterministic, alternating, or weak alternating parity automaton. These
questions are known as, respectively, the non-deterministic, alternating, and
weak Rabin-Mostowski index problems. Whether they can be answered effectively
is a long-standing open problem, solved so far only for languages recognizable
by deterministic automata (the alternating variant trivializes).
We investigate a wider class of regular languages, recognizable by so-called
game automata, which can be seen as the closure of deterministic ones under
complementation and composition. Game automata are known to recognize languages
arbitrarily high in the alternating Rabin-Mostowski index hierarchy; that is,
the alternating index problem does not trivialize any more.
Our main contribution is that all three index problems are decidable for
languages recognizable by game automata. Additionally, we show that it is
decidable whether a given regular language can be recognized by a game
automaton
Good for Games Automata: From Nondeterminism to Alternation
A word automaton recognizing a language is good for games (GFG) if its
composition with any game with winning condition preserves the game's
winner. While all deterministic automata are GFG, some nondeterministic
automata are not. There are various other properties that are used in the
literature for defining that a nondeterministic automaton is GFG, including
"history-deterministic", "compliant with some letter game", "good for trees",
and "good for composition with other automata". The equivalence of these
properties has not been formally shown.
We generalize all of these definitions to alternating automata and show their
equivalence. We further show that alternating GFG automata are as expressive as
deterministic automata with the same acceptance conditions and indices. We then
show that alternating GFG automata over finite words, and weak automata over
infinite words, are not more succinct than deterministic automata, and that
determinizing B\"uchi and co-B\"uchi alternating GFG automata involves a
state blow-up. We leave open the question of whether
alternating GFG automata of stronger acceptance conditions allow for
doubly-exponential succinctness compared to deterministic automata.Comment: Full version of a paper of the same name accepted fr publication at
the 30th International Conference on Concurrency Theor
On Pebble Automata for Data Languages with Decidable Emptiness Problem
In this paper we study a subclass of pebble automata (PA) for data languages
for which the emptiness problem is decidable. Namely, we introduce the
so-called top view weak PA. Roughly speaking, top view weak PA are weak PA
where the equality test is performed only between the data values seen by the
two most recently placed pebbles. The emptiness problem for this model is
decidable. We also show that it is robust: alternating, nondeterministic and
deterministic top view weak PA have the same recognition power. Moreover, this
model is strong enough to accept all data languages expressible in Linear
Temporal Logic with the future-time operators, augmented with one register
freeze quantifier.Comment: An extended abstract of this work has been published in the
proceedings of the 34th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations
of Computer Science (MFCS) 2009}, Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science
5734, pages 712-72
Weak Alternating Timed Automata
Alternating timed automata on infinite words are considered. The main result
is a characterization of acceptance conditions for which the emptiness problem
for these automata is decidable. This result implies new decidability results
for fragments of timed temporal logics. It is also shown that, unlike for MITL,
the characterisation remains the same even if no punctual constraints are
allowed
The \mu-Calculus Alternation Hierarchy Collapses over Structures with Restricted Connectivity
It is known that the alternation hierarchy of least and greatest fixpoint
operators in the mu-calculus is strict. However, the strictness of the
alternation hierarchy does not necessarily carry over when considering
restricted classes of structures. A prominent instance is the class of infinite
words over which the alternation-free fragment is already as expressive as the
full mu-calculus. Our current understanding of when and why the mu-calculus
alternation hierarchy is not strict is limited. This paper makes progress in
answering these questions by showing that the alternation hierarchy of the
mu-calculus collapses to the alternation-free fragment over some classes of
structures, including infinite nested words and finite graphs with feedback
vertex sets of a bounded size. Common to these classes is that the connectivity
between the components in a structure from such a class is restricted in the
sense that the removal of certain vertices from the structure's graph
decomposes it into graphs in which all paths are of finite length. Our collapse
results are obtained in an automata-theoretic setting. They subsume,
generalize, and strengthen several prior results on the expressivity of the
mu-calculus over restricted classes of structures.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2012, arXiv:1210.202
Truly On-The-Fly LTL Model Checking
We propose a novel algorithm for automata-based LTL model checking that
interleaves the construction of the generalized B\"{u}chi automaton for the
negation of the formula and the emptiness check. Our algorithm first converts
the LTL formula into a linear weak alternating automaton; configurations of the
alternating automaton correspond to the locations of a generalized B\"{u}chi
automaton, and a variant of Tarjan's algorithm is used to decide the existence
of an accepting run of the product of the transition system and the automaton.
Because we avoid an explicit construction of the B\"{u}chi automaton, our
approach can yield significant improvements in runtime and memory, for large
LTL formulas. The algorithm has been implemented within the SPIN model checker,
and we present experimental results for some benchmark examples
An Efficient Normalisation Procedure for Linear Temporal Logic and Very Weak Alternating Automata
In the mid 80s, Lichtenstein, Pnueli, and Zuck proved a classical theorem
stating that every formula of Past LTL (the extension of LTL with past
operators) is equivalent to a formula of the form , where
and contain only past operators. Some years later, Chang,
Manna, and Pnueli built on this result to derive a similar normal form for LTL.
Both normalisation procedures have a non-elementary worst-case blow-up, and
follow an involved path from formulas to counter-free automata to star-free
regular expressions and back to formulas. We improve on both points. We present
a direct and purely syntactic normalisation procedure for LTL yielding a normal
form, comparable to the one by Chang, Manna, and Pnueli, that has only a single
exponential blow-up. As an application, we derive a simple algorithm to
translate LTL into deterministic Rabin automata. The algorithm normalises the
formula, translates it into a special very weak alternating automaton, and
applies a simple determinisation procedure, valid only for these special
automata.Comment: This is the extended version of the referenced conference paper and
contains an appendix with additional materia
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