On the expressiveness and decidability of higher-order process calculi

In higher-order process calculi, the values exchanged in communications may contain processes. A core calculus of higher-order concurrency is studied; it has only the operators necessary to express higher-order communications: input prefix, process output, and parallel composition. By exhibiting a deterministic encoding of Minsky machines, the calculus is shown to be Turing complete. Therefore its termination problem is undecidable. Strong bisimilarity, however, is shown to be decidable. Furthermore, the main forms of strong bisimilarity for higher-order processes (higher-order bisimilarity, context bisimilarity, normal bisimilarity, barbed congruence) coincide. They also coincide with their asynchronous versions. A sound and complete axiomatization of bisimilarity is given. Finally, bisimilarity is shown to become undecidable if at least four static (i.e., top-level) restrictions are added to the calculus.     

Weak bisimilarity and regularity of context-free processes is EXPTIME-hard

We show that checking weak bisimulation equivalence of two context-free processes (also called BPA-processes) is EXPTIME-hard, even under the condition that the processes are normed. Furthermore, checking weak regularity (finiteness up to weak bisimilarity) for context-free processes is EXPTIME-hard as well. Adding a finite control of the minimal non-trivial size of 2 to the BPA process already makes weak bisimilarity undecidable.     

Refining the Undecidability Border of Weak Bisimilarity

Weak bisimilarity is one of the most studied behavioural equivalences. This equivalence is undecidable for pushdown processes (PDA), process algebras (PA), and multiset automata (MSA, also known as parallel pushdown processes, PPDA). Its decidability is an open question for basic process algebras (BPA) and basic parallel processes (BPP). We move the undecidability border towards these classes by showing that the equivalence remains undecidable for weakly extended versions of BPA and BPP. In fact, we show that the weak bisimulation equivalence problem is undecidable even for normed subclasses of BPA and BPP extended with a finite constraint system.     

Decision problems for semi-Thue systems with a few rules

We show that the accessibility problem, the common descendant problem, the termination problem and the uniform termination problem are undecidable for 3-rules semi-Thue systems. As a corollary we obtain the undecidability of the Post correspondence problem for 7 rules.     

Deciding Global Partial-Order Properties

Model checking of asynchronous systems is traditionally based on the interleaving model, where an execution is modeled by a total order between atomic events. Recently, the use of partial order semantics, representing the causal order between events, is becoming popular. This paper considers the model checking problem for partial-order temporal logics. Solutions to this problem exist for partial order logics over local states. For the more general global logics that are interpreted over global states, only undecidability results have been proved. In this paper, we present a decision procedure for a partial order temporal logic over global states. We also sharpen the undecidability results by showing that a single until operator is sufficient for undecidability.A preliminary version of this paper appears in Proceedings of the 25th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP98), LNCS 1443, pp. 41–52, 1998.     

New proof for the undecidability of the circular PCP

We give simpler proof for the undecidability of the circular Post Correspondence Problem that was originally proved undecidable by Ruohonen (Acta Informatica 19:357–367, 1983). The key feature of our proof is the undecidability of the word problem of special semi-Thue systems where derivations are deterministic and reversible for words containing a single occurrence of a letter from a given set.     

On an undecidable problem related to difference equations with parameters

Linear difference equations with polynomial coefficients depending on parameters are considered. It is proved that the problem of existence of numerical values of parameters for which the given equation has a polynomial solution (alternatively, a solution given by a rational function) is undecidable (similar to the undecidability of the same problem in the differential case proved by J.-A. Weil).     

Achieving distributed control through model checking

We apply model checking of knowledge properties to the design of distributed controllers that enforce global constraints on concurrent systems. The problem of synthesizing a distributed controller is undecidable in the general case. We thus look at a variant of the synthesis problem that allows adding temporary synchronizations between processes. We calculate when processes can decide autonomously, based on their knowledge, whether to take or block an action so that the global constraint is not violated. The local knowledge of processes may not suffice to control the processes so as to achieve the global constraint without introducing new deadlocks. When individual processes cannot take a decision alone based on their knowledge, one may coordinate several processes to achieve joint knowledge in order to take joint decisions. A fixed coordination among sets of processes may severely degrade concurrency. Therefore, we propose the use of temporary coordinations. Since realizing such coordinations on a distributed platform induces communication overhead, we strive to minimize their number. We show how this framework is applied to the case of synthesizing a distributed controller for enforcing a priority order. Finally, we show that the general undecidability of distributed synthesis without adding synchronization holds even for the particular problem of enforcing a priority order.     

Post Correspondence Problem for short words

We prove that the generalized Post Correspondence Problem is undecidable for instances where the lengths of the image words are at most 2 and the number of pairs of words is at most 30. The proof uses undecidability of the word problem of the Tzeitin semigroup. We also transform our constructions in order to achieve a proof for the undecidability of the (not generalized) Post Correspondence Problem with image words of length at most 2.     

Model checking Petri nets with names using data-centric dynamic systems

Petri nets with name creation and management (\({\nu}\)-PNs) have been recently introduced as an expressive model for dynamic (distributed) systems, whose dynamics are determined not only by how tokens flow in the system, but also by the pure names they carry. On the one hand, this extension makes the resulting nets strictly more expressive than P/T nets: they can be exploited to capture a plethora of interesting systems, such as distributed systems enriched with channels and name passing, service interaction with correlation mechanisms, and resource-constrained workflow nets that explicitly account for process instances. On the other hand, fundamental properties like coverability, termination and boundedness are decidable for \({\nu}\)-PNs. In this work, we go one step beyond the verification of such general properties, and provide decidability and undecidability results of model checking \({\nu}\)-PNs against variants of first-order \({\mu}\)-calculus, recently proposed in the area of data-aware process analysis. While this model checking problem is undecidable in the general case, decidability can be obtained by considering different forms of boundedness, which still give raise to an infinite-state transition system. We then ground our framework to tackle the problem of soundness checking over workflow nets enriched with explicit process instances and resources. Notably, our decidability results are obtained via a translation to data-centric dynamic systems, a recently devised framework for the formal specification and verification of data-aware business processes working over full-fledged relational databases with constraints. In this light, our results contribute to the cross-fertilization between the area of formal methods for concurrent systems and that of foundations of data-aware processes, which has not been extensively investigated so far.     

The periodic domino problem revisited

In this article, we give a new proof of the undecidability of the periodic domino problem. Compared to previous proofs, the main difference is that this one does not start from a proof of the undecidability of the (general) domino problem but only from the existence of an aperiodic tileset.     

Synchronizability of conversations among Web services

We present a framework for analyzing interactions among Web services that communicate with asynchronous messages. We model the interactions among the peers participating in a composite Web service as conversations, the global sequences of messages exchanged among the peers. This naturally leads to the following model checking problem: Given an LTL property and a composite Web service, do the conversations generated by the composite Web service satisfy the property? We show that asynchronous messaging leads to state space explosion for bounded message queues and undecidability of the model checking problem for unbounded message queues. We propose a technique called synchronizability analysis to tackle this problem. If a composite Web service is synchronizable, its conversation set remains the same when asynchronous communication is replaced with synchronous communication. We give a set of sufficient conditions that guarantee synchronizability and that can be checked statically. Based on our synchronizability results, we show that a large class of composite Web services with unbounded message queues can be verified completely using a finite state model checker such as SPIN. We also show that synchronizability analysis can be used to check the reliability of top-down conversation specifications and we contrast the conversation model with the Message Sequence Charts. We integrated synchronizability analysis to a tool we developed for analyzing composite Web services.     

On the Expressive Power of Temporal Concurrent Constraint Programming Languages: (invited talk)

The tcc paradigm is a formalism for timed concurrent constraint programming. Several tcc languages differing in their way of expressing infinite behavior have been proposed in the literature. In this work we study the expressive power of some of these languages. In particular, we show that: (1) recursive procedures with parameters can be encoded into parameterless recursive procedures with dynamic scoping, and viceversa. (2) replication can be encoded into parameterless recursive procedures with static scoping, and viceversa. (3) the languages from (1) are strictly more expressive than the languages from (2). Furthermore, we show that behavioral equivalence is undecidable for the languages from (1), but decidable for the languages from (2). The undecidability result holds even if the process variables take values from a fixed finite domain.(Joint work with Mogens Nielsen and Frank D. Valencia)     

The undecidability of self-embedding for term rewriting systems

The self-embedding property of term rewriting systems is closely related to the uniform termination property, since a nonself-embedding term rewriting system is uniform terminating. The self-embedding property is shown to be undecidable and partially decidable. It follows that the nonself-embedding property is not partially decidable. This is true even for globally finite term rewriting systems. The same construction gives an easy alternate proof that uniform termination is undecidable in general and also for globally finite term rewriting systems. Also, the looping property is shown to be undecidable in the same way.     

Lower-bound-constrained runs in weighted timed automata

We investigate a number of problems related to infinite runs of weighted timed automata (with a single weight variable), subject to lower-bound constraints on the accumulated weight. Closing an open problem from Bouyer et al. (2008), we show that the existence of an infinite lower-bound-constrained run is—for us somewhat unexpectedly—undecidable for weighted timed automata with four or more clocks.This undecidability result assumes a fixed and known initial credit. We show that the related problem of existence of an initial credit for which there exists a feasible run is decidable in PSPACE. We also investigate the variant of these problems where only bounded-duration runs are considered, showing that this restriction makes our original problem decidable in  NEXPTIME. We prove that the universal versions of all those problems (i.e, checking that all the considered runs satisfy the lower-bound constraint) are decidable in PSPACE.Finally, we extend this study to multi-weighted timed automata: the existence of a feasible run becomes undecidable even for bounded duration, but the existence of initial credits remains decidable (in PSPACE).     

Simulating perfect channels with probabilistic lossy channels

We consider the problem of deciding whether an infinite-state system (expressed as a Markov chain) satisfies a correctness property with probability 1. This problem is, of course, undecidable for general infinite-state systems. We focus our attention on the model of probabilistic lossy channel systems consisting of finite-state processes that communicate over unbounded lossy FIFO channels. Abdulla and Jonsson have shown that safety properties are decidable while progress properties are undecidable for non-probabilistic lossy channel systems. Under assumptions of “sufficiently high” probability of loss, Baier and Engelen have shown how to check whether a property holds of probabilistic lossy channel system with probability 1. In this paper, we consider a model of probabilistic lossy channel systems, where messages can be lost only during send transitions. In contrast to the model of Baier and Engelen, once a message is successfully sent to channel, it can only be removed through a transition which receives the message. We show that checking whether safety properties hold with probability 1 is undecidable for this model. Our proof depends upon simulating a perfect channel, with a high degree of confidence, using lossy channels.     

Priority systems with many identical processes

In this paper, we consider the termination problem for systems with an arbitrary number of identical priority finite-state processes. In our model, the number of finite-state processes involved in the computation is arbitrary, and a priority is assigned to each transition of a process to indicate the degree of importance or urgency. We show that the termination problem is undecidable for such systems, even when the underlying interprocess communication structure is a star. The undecidability result holds for systems with acyclic processes as well. However, if we require that no two processes reside in the same state (except the starting state) during the course of the computation, the termination problem is PSPACE-complete. Finally, we show that if the priority relation is empty, the problem becomes PTIME-complete.     

Abstract regular (tree) model checking

Regular model checking is a generic technique for verification of infinite-state and/or parametrised systems which uses finite word automata or finite tree automata to finitely represent potentially infinite sets of reachable configurations of the systems being verified. The problems addressed by regular model checking are typically undecidable. In order to facilitate termination in as many cases as possible, acceleration is needed in the incremental computation of the set of reachable configurations in regular model checking. In this work, we describe how various incrementally refinable abstractions on finite (word and tree) automata can be used for this purpose. Moreover, the use of abstraction does not only increase chances of the technique to terminate, but it also significantly reduces the problem of an explosion in the number of states of the automata that are generated by regular model checking. We illustrate the efficiency of abstract regular (tree) model checking in verification of simple systems with various sources of infinity such as unbounded counters, queues, stacks, and parameters. We then show how abstract regular tree model checking can be used for verification of programs manipulating tree-like dynamic data structures. Even more complex data structures can be handled using a suitable tree-like encoding.     

Null Inclusion Dependencies in Relational Databases

Functional dependencies (FDs) and inclusion dependencies (INDs) are the most fundamental integrity constraints that arise in practice in relational databases. We introduce null inclusion dependencies (NINDs) to cater for the situation when a database is incomplete and contains null values. We show that the implication problem for NINDs is the same as that for INDs. We then present a sound and complete axiom system for null functional dependencies (NFDs) and NINDs, and prove that the implication problem for NFDs and NINDs is decidable and EXPTIME-complete. By contrast, when no nulls are allowed, this implication problem is undecidable. This undecidability result has motivated several researchers to restrict their attention to FDs and noncircular INDs in which case the implication problem was shown to be EXPTIME- complete. Our results imply that when considering nulls in relational database design we need not assume that NINDs are noncircular.