Strong bisimilarity on normed BPA is polynomial-time decidable, while weak
bisimilarity on totally normed BPA is NP-hard. It is natural to ask where the
computational complexity of branching bisimilarity on totally normed BPA lies.
This paper confirms that this problem is polynomial-time decidable. To our
knowledge, in the presence of silent transitions, this is the first
bisimilarity checking algorithm on infinite state systems which runs in
polynomial time. This result spots an instance in which branching bisimilarity
and weak bisimilarity are both decidable but lie in different complexity
classes (unless NP=P), which is not known before.
The algorithm takes the partition refinement approach and the final
implementation can be thought of as a generalization of the previous algorithm
of Czerwi\'{n}ski and Lasota. However, unexpectedly, the correctness of the
algorithm cannot be directly generalized from previous works, and the
correctness proof turns out to be subtle. The proof depends on the existence of
a carefully defined refinement operation fitted for our algorithm and the
proposal of elaborately developed techniques, which are quite different from
previous works.Comment: 32 page