109 research outputs found
A Delayed Promotion Policy for Parity Games
Parity games are two-player infinite-duration games on graphs that play a
crucial role in various fields of theoretical computer science. Finding
efficient algorithms to solve these games in practice is widely acknowledged as
a core problem in formal verification, as it leads to efficient solutions of
the model-checking and satisfiability problems of expressive temporal logics,
e.g., the modal muCalculus. Their solution can be reduced to the problem of
identifying sets of positions of the game, called dominions, in each of which a
player can force a win by remaining in the set forever. Recently, a novel
technique to compute dominions, called priority promotion, has been proposed,
which is based on the notions of quasi dominion, a relaxed form of dominion,
and dominion space. The underlying framework is general enough to accommodate
different instantiations of the solution procedure, whose correctness is
ensured by the nature of the space itself. In this paper we propose a new such
instantiation, called delayed promotion, that tries to reduce the possible
exponential behaviours exhibited by the original method in the worst case. The
resulting procedure not only often outperforms the original priority promotion
approach, but so far no exponential worst case is known.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2016, arXiv:1609.0364
Robust Exponential Worst Cases for Divide-et-Impera Algorithms for Parity Games
The McNaughton-Zielonka divide et impera algorithm is the simplest and most
flexible approach available in the literature for determining the winner in a
parity game. Despite its theoretical worst-case complexity and the negative
reputation as a poorly effective algorithm in practice, it has been shown to
rank among the best techniques for the solution of such games. Also, it proved
to be resistant to a lower bound attack, even more than the strategy
improvements approaches, and only recently a family of games on which the
algorithm requires exponential time has been provided by Friedmann. An easy
analysis of this family shows that a simple memoization technique can help the
algorithm solve the family in polynomial time. The same result can also be
achieved by exploiting an approach based on the dominion-decomposition
techniques proposed in the literature. These observations raise the question
whether a suitable combination of dynamic programming and game-decomposition
techniques can improve on the exponential worst case of the original algorithm.
In this paper we answer this question negatively, by providing a robustly
exponential worst case, showing that no intertwining of the above mentioned
techniques can help mitigating the exponential nature of the divide et impera
approaches.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2017, arXiv:1709.0176
MCMAS-SLK: A Model Checker for the Verification of Strategy Logic Specifications
We introduce MCMAS-SLK, a BDD-based model checker for the verification of
systems against specifications expressed in a novel, epistemic variant of
strategy logic. We give syntax and semantics of the specification language and
introduce a labelling algorithm for epistemic and strategy logic modalities. We
provide details of the checker which can also be used for synthesising agents'
strategies so that a specification is satisfied by the system. We evaluate the
efficiency of the implementation by discussing the results obtained for the
dining cryptographers protocol and a variant of the cake-cutting problem
Herbrand property, finite quasi-Herbrand models, and a Chandra-Merlin theorem for quantified conjunctive queries
Reasoning About Strategies: On the Model-Checking Problem
In open systems verification, to formally check for reliability, one needs an
appropriate formalism to model the interaction between agents and express the
correctness of the system no matter how the environment behaves. An important
contribution in this context is given by modal logics for strategic ability, in
the setting of multi-agent games, such as ATL, ATL\star, and the like.
Recently, Chatterjee, Henzinger, and Piterman introduced Strategy Logic, which
we denote here by CHP-SL, with the aim of getting a powerful framework for
reasoning explicitly about strategies. CHP-SL is obtained by using first-order
quantifications over strategies and has been investigated in the very specific
setting of two-agents turned-based games, where a non-elementary model-checking
algorithm has been provided. While CHP-SL is a very expressive logic, we claim
that it does not fully capture the strategic aspects of multi-agent systems. In
this paper, we introduce and study a more general strategy logic, denoted SL,
for reasoning about strategies in multi-agent concurrent games. We prove that
SL includes CHP-SL, while maintaining a decidable model-checking problem. In
particular, the algorithm we propose is computationally not harder than the
best one known for CHP-SL. Moreover, we prove that such a problem for SL is
NonElementarySpace-hard. This negative result has spurred us to investigate
here syntactic fragments of SL, strictly subsuming ATL\star, with the hope of
obtaining an elementary model-checking problem. Among the others, we study the
sublogics SL[NG], SL[BG], and SL[1G]. They encompass formulas in a special
prenex normal form having, respectively, nested temporal goals, Boolean
combinations of goals and, a single goal at a time. About these logics, we
prove that the model-checking problem for SL[1G] is 2ExpTime-complete, thus not
harder than the one for ATL\star
Satisfiability in Strategy Logic can be Easier than Model Checking
In the design of complex systems, model-checking and satisfiability arise as two prominent decision problems. While model-checking requires the designed system to be provided in advance, satisfiability allows to check if such a system even exists. With very few exceptions, the second problem turns out to be harder than the first one from a complexity-theoretic standpoint. In this paper, we investigate the connection between the two problems for a non-trivial fragment of Strategy Logic (SL, for short). SL extends LTL with first-order quantifications over strategies, thus allowing to explicitly reason about the strategic abilities of agents in a multi-agent system. Satisfiability for the full logic is known to be highly undecidable, while model-checking is non-elementary.The SL fragment we consider is obtained by preventing strategic quantifications within the scope of temporal operators. The resulting logic is quite powerful, still allowing to express important game-theoretic properties of multi-agent systems, such as existence of Nash and immune equilibria, as well as to formalize the rational synthesis problem. We show that satisfiability for such a fragment is PSPACE-COMPLETE, while its model-checking complexity is 2EXPTIME-HARD. The result is obtained by means of an elegant encoding of the problem into the satisfiability of conjunctive-binding first-order logic, a recently discovered decidable fragment of first-order logic
On the decidability of linear bounded periodic cyber-physical systems
Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are integrations of distributed computing systems with physical processes via a networking with actuators and sensors, where feedback loops among the components allow the physical processes to affect the computations and vice versa. Although CPSs can be found in several complex and sometimes critical real-world domains, their verification and validation often relies on simulation-test systems rather then automatic methodologies to formally verify safety requirements. In this work, we prove the decidability of the reachability problem for discrete-time linear CPSs whose physical process in isolation has a periodic behavior, up to an initial transitory phase
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