An algebraic approach to data languages and timed languages

Algebra offers an elegant and powerful approach to understand regular languages and finite automata. Such framework has been notoriously lacking for timed languages and timed automata. We introduce the notion of monoid recognizability for data languages, which includes timed languages as special case, in a way that respects the spirit of the classical situation. We study closure properties and hierarchies in this model and prove that emptiness is decidable under natural hypotheses. Our class of recognizable languages properly includes many families of deterministic timed languages that have been proposed until now, and the same holds for non-deterministic versions.     

Regular Languages Accepted by Quantum Automata

In this paper we analyze some features of the behaviour of quantum automata. In particular we prove that the class of languages recognized by quantum automata with isolated cut point is the class of reversible regular languages. As a more general result, we give a bound on the inverse error that implies the regularity of the language accepted by a quantum automaton.     

Some Properties of Iterated Languages

A special kind of substitution on languages called iteration is presented and studied. These languages arise in the application of semantic automata to iterations of generalized quantifiers. We show that each of the star-free, regular, and deterministic context-free languages are closed under iteration and that it is decidable whether a given regular or determinstic context-free language is an iteration of two such languages. This result can be read as saying that the van Benthem/Keenan ‘Frege Boundary’ is decidable for large subclasses of natural language quantifiers. We also determine the state complexity of iteration of regular languages.     

A Kleene theorem for splitable signals

In this paper, we consider timed automata for piecewise constant signals and prove that they recognize exactly the languages denoted by signal regular expressions with intersection and renaming. The main differences from the usual timed automata are: time elapses on transitions (passing through a state is instantaneous), signals may be split on a run on an automaton and constraints on transitions correspond to unions of open intervals but should be satisfied on closed intervals. This makes exact rendez-vous impossible. The paper stresses on the similarities and differences from the usual model.     

Language equations for timed alternating finite automata

Traditionally, finite state automata are untimed or asynchronous models of computation in which only the ordering of events, not the time at which events occur, would affect the result of a computation. For real-time systems, it is important to augment these models of computation with a notion of time. For this purpose timed automata have become a powerful canonical model for describing timed behaviors and an effective tool for modeling real-time computations. In this paper, we extend the notion of timed alternating finite automata (TAFA), a class of alternating finite automata (AFA) extended with a finite set of real-valued clocks, and we present an algebraic interpretation of TAFA which parallels that of timed regular expressions and language equations. We further extend the equational representation of AFA to describe timed alternating finite automata, and explore solutions for such equations over time languages.     

Axiomatising timed automata

Timed automata has been developed as a basic semantic model for real time systems. Its algorithmic aspects for automated analysis have been well studied. But so far there is still no satisfactory algebraic theory to allow the derivation of semantical equivalence of automata by purely syntactical manipulation. The aim of this paper is to provide such a theory. We present an inference system of timed bisimulation equivalence for timed automata based on a CCS-style regular language for describing timed automata. It consists of the standard monoid laws for bisimulation and a set of inference rules. The judgments of the proof system are conditional equations of the form where is a clock constraint and t,u are terms denoting timed automata. The inference system is shown to be sound and complete for timed bisimulation. The proof of the completeness result relies on the notion of symbolic timed bisimulation, adapted from the work on value–passing processes. Received: 10 May 2001 / 22 October 2001     

Balanced timed regular expressions

Several classes of regular expressions for timed languages accepted by timed automata have been suggested in the literature. In this article we introduce balanced timed regular expressions with colored parentheses which are equivalent to timed automata, and, differently from existing definitions, do not refer to clock values, and do not use additional operations such as intersection and renaming.     

Template languages for fault monitoring of timed discrete eventprocesses

This paper introduces a new framework for modeling discrete event processes. This framework, called condition templates, allows the modeling of processes in which both single-instance and multiple-instance behaviors are exhibited concurrently. A single-instance behavior corresponds to a trace from a single finite-state process, and a multiple-instance behavior corresponds to the timed interleavings of an unspecified number of identical processes operating at the same time. The template framework allows the modeling of correct operation for systems consisting of concurrent mixtures of both single and multiple-instance behaviors. This representation can then be used in online fault monitoring for confirming the correct operation of a system. We compare the class of timed languages representable by template models with classes of timed languages from timed automata models. It is shown that templates are able to model timed languages corresponding to single and multiple-instance behaviors and combinations thereof. Templates can thus represent languages that could not be represented or monitored using timed automata alone     

On a class of languages recognizable by probabilistic reversible decide-and-halt automata

We analyze the properties of probabilistic reversible decide-and-halt automata (DH-PRA) and show that there is a strong relationship between DH-PRA and 1-way quantum automata. We show that a general class of regular languages is not recognizable by DH-PRA by proving that two “forbidden” constructions in minimal deterministic automata correspond to languages not recognizable by DH-PRA. The shown class is identical to a class known to be not recognizable by 1-way quantum automata. We also prove that the class of languages recognizable by DH-PRA is not closed under union and other non-trivial Boolean operations.     

A study on shuffle, stopwatches and independently evolving clocks

We show that stopwatch automata are equivalent with timed shuffle expressions, an extension of timed regular expressions with the shuffle operation. Since the emptiness problem is undecidable for stopwatch automata, and hence also for timed shuffle expressions, we introduce a decidable subclass of stopwatch automata called partitioned stopwatch automata. We give for this class an equivalent subclass of timed shuffle expressions and investigate closure properties by showing that partitioned stopwatch automata are closed under union, concatenation, star, shuffle and renaming, but not under intersection. We also show that partitioned stopwatch automata are equivalent with distributed time-asynchronous automata, which are asynchronous compositions of timed automata in which time may evolve independently.     

A Kleene–Schützenberger theorem for weighted timed automata

During the last years, weighted timed automata have received much interest in the real-time community. Weighted timed automata form an extension of timed automata and allow us to assign weights (costs) to both locations and edges. This model, introduced by Alur et al. (2001) and Behrmann et al. (2001), permits the treatment of continuous consumption of resources and has led to much research on scheduling problems, optimal reachability and model checking. Also, several authors have derived Kleene-type characterizations of (unweighted) timed automata and their accepted timed languages. The goal of this paper is to provide a characterization of the behaviours of weighted timed automata by rational power series. We define weighted timed automata with weights taken in an arbitrary semiring, resulting in a model that subsumes several weighted timed automata concepts of the literature. For our main result, we combine the methods of Schützenberger, a recent approach for a Kleene-type theorem for unweighted timed automata by Bouyer and Petit as well as new techniques. Our main result also implies Kleene-type theorems for several subclasses of weighted timed automata investigated before, e.g., for timed automata and timed automata with stopwatch observers.     

量子Müller自动机与单体二阶量子逻辑

给出量子Müller自动机（简称LVMA）的概念,通过引入量子有限步可识别语言和量子状态构造方法,证明了在量子逻辑意义下4类量子Müller自动机彼此相互等价.利用该等价性,建立了量子无穷正则语言的代数刻画和层次刻画,籍此研究了量子无穷正则语言关于无穷正则运算的封闭性.同时,给出了量子Müller自动机所识别语言的单体二阶逻辑描述,深化和推广了量子逻辑意义下的Büchi基本定理.     

MSO logics for weighted timed automata

We aim to generalize Büchi’s fundamental theorem on the coincidence of recognizable and MSO-definable languages to a weighted timed setting. For this, we investigate weighted timed automata and show how we can extend Wilke’s relative distance logic with weights taken from an arbitrary semiring. We show that every formula in our logic can effectively be transformed into a weighted timed automaton, and vice versa. The results indicate the robustness of weighted timed automata and may also be used for specification purposes.     

A Burnside Approach to the Finite Substitution Problem

We introduce a new model of weighted automata: the desert automata. We show that their limitedness problem is PSPACE-complete by solving the underlying Burnside problem. As an application of this result, we give a positive solution to the so-called finite substitution problem which was open for more than 10 years: given recognizable languages K and L, decide whether there exists a finite substitution σ such that σ(K) = L.     

Look-ahead on pushdowns

The general notion of look-ahead on pushdowns is used to prove that (1) the deterministic iterated pushdown languages are closed under complementation, (2) the deterministic iterated pushdown languages are properly included in the non-deterministic iterated pushdown languages; the counter example is a very simple linear context-free language, independent of the amount of iteration, (3) LL(k) iterated indexed grammars can be parsed by deterministic iterated pushdown automata, and (4) it is decidable whether an iterated indexed grammar is LL(k). Analogous results hold for iterated pushdown automata with regular look-ahead on the input, and LL-regular iterated indexed grammars.     

Forward Analysis of Updatable Timed Automata

Timed automata are a widely studied model. Its decidability has been proved using the so-called region automaton construction. This construction provides a correct abstraction for the behaviours of timed automata, but it suffers from a state explosion and is thus not used in practice. Instead, algorithms based on the notion of zones are implemented using adapted data structures like DBMs. When we focus on forward analysis algorithms, the exact computation of all the successors of the initial configurations does not always terminate. Thus, some abstractions are often used to ensure termination, among which, a widening operator on zones.In this paper, we study in detail this widening operator and the corresponding forward analysis algorithm. This algorithm is most used and implemented in tools like KRONOS and UPPAAL. One of our main results is that it is hopeless to find a forward analysis algorithm for general timed automata, that uses such a widening operator, and which is correct. This goes really against what one could think. We then study in detail this algorithm in the more general framework of updatable timed automata, a model which has been introduced as a natural syntactic extension of classical timed automata. We describe subclasses of this model for which a correct widening operator can be found.     

A note on partially ordered tree automata

A recent paper by Bouajjani, Muscholl and Touili shows that the class of languages accepted by partially ordered word automata (or equivalently accepted by Σ₂-formulae) is closed under semi-commutation and it suggested the following open question: can we extend this result to tree languages? This problem can be addressed by proving (1) that the class of tree regular languages accepted by Σ₂ formulae is strictly included in the class of languages accepted by partially ordered automata, and (2) that Bouajjani and the others results cannot be extended to tree.     

正则语言的一个特征

Myhill-Nerode定理利用等价关系描述了正则语言的一个重要特征,它是有限自动机理论中的一个经典、优美的结果。为了将Myhill-Nerode定理推广到更一般的情形,引入了有限自动机M上的状态转移半群和Σ*上的M-半群,讨论了其若干性质。在此基础上,将Myhill-Nerode定理中的等价关系一般化,给出了正则语言的一个新的特征定理,Myhill-Nerode定理成为该定理的一个推论。讨论了正则语言的最一般的特征,提出了有待进一步研究的问题。     

Reachability results for timed automata with unbounded data structures

Systems of Data Management Timed Automata (SDMTAs) are networks of communicating timed automata with structures to store messages and functions to manipulate them. We prove the decidability of the reachability problem for a subclass of SDMTAs which assumes an unbounded knowledge, and we analyze the expressiveness of the model and the considered subclass. In particular, while SDMTAs can simulate a Turing machine, and hence the reachability problem is in general undecidable, the subclass for which reachability is decidable, when endowed with a concept of recognized language, accepts languages that are not regular. As an application, we model and analyze a variation of the Yahalom protocol.     

The efficiency of identifying timed automata and the power of clocks

We develop theory on the efficiency of identifying (learning) timed automata. In particular, we show that: (i) deterministic timed automata cannot be identified efficiently in the limit from labeled data and (ii) that one-clock deterministic timed automata can be identified efficiently in the limit from labeled data. We prove these results based on the distinguishability of these classes of timed automata. More specifically, we prove that the languages of deterministic timed automata cannot, and that one-clock deterministic timed automata can be distinguished from each other using strings in length bounded by a polynomial. In addition, we provide an algorithm that identifies one-clock deterministic timed automata efficiently from labeled data.Our results have interesting consequences for the power of clocks that are interesting also out of the scope of the identification problem.