Proceedings of the twenty-eighth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing

Review: Roland Fraisse, Sur Quelques Classifications des Systemes de Relations

Weighted automata model quantitative aspects of systems like memory or power consumption. Recently, Chatterjee, Doyen, and Henzinger introduced a new kind of weighted automata which compute objectives like the average cost or the long-time peak power consumption. In these automata, operations like average, limit superior, limit inferior, limit average, or discounting are used to assign values to finite or infinite words. In general, these weighted automata are not semiring weighted anymore. Here, we establish a connection between such new kinds of weighted automata and weighted logics. We show that suitable weighted MSO logics and these new weighted automata are expressively equivalent, both for finite and infinite words. The constructions employed are effective, leading to decidability results for the weighted logic formulas considered.

Weighted automata and weighted MSO logics for average and long-time behaviors

Parametric timed automata (PTA) are a powerful formalism to reason, simulate and formally verify critical real-time systems. After two decades of research on PTA, it is now well-understood that any non-trivial problem studied is undecidable for general PTA. We provide here a survey of decision and computation problems for PTA. On the one hand, bounding time, bounding the number of parameters or the domain of the parameters does not (in general) lead to any decidability. On the other hand, restricting the number of clocks, the use of clocks (compared or not with the parameters), and the use of parameters (e.g., used only as upper or lower bounds) leads to decidability of some problems.

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What’s decidable about parametric timed automata?

This paper is concerned with the universality problem for timed automata: given a timed automaton A, does A accept all timed words? Alur and Dill have shown that the universality problem is undecidable if A has two clocks, but they left open the status of the problem when A has a single clock. In this paper we close this gap for timed automata over infinite words by showing that the one-clock universality problem is undecidable. For timed automata over finite words we show that the one-clock universality problem is decidable with non-primitive recursive complexity. This reveals a surprising divergence between the theory of timed automata over finite words and over infinite words. We also show that if e-transitions or non-singular postconditions are allowed, then the one-clock universality problem is undecidable over both finite and infinite words. Furthermore, we present a zone-based algorithm for solving the universality problem for single-clock timed automata. We apply the theory of better quasi-orderings, a refinement of the theory of well quasi-orderings, to prove termination of the algorithm. We have implemented a prototype tool based on our method, and checked universality for a number of timed automata. Comparisons with a region-based prototype tool confirm that zones are a more succinct representation, and hence allow a much more efficient implementation of the universality algorithm.

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Universality Analysis for One-Clock Timed Automata

A weighted timed automaton is a timed automaton equipped with weights on transitions and weight rates on locations. These weights may be positive or negative, corresponding to the production and consumption of some resources. We consider the interval-bound problem: does there exist an infinite run such that the accumulated weight for each prefix of the run is within some given bounds? We show that this problem is undecidable if the weighted timed automaton has more than one clock and more than one weight variable. We further prove that the problem is PSPACE-complete if we restrict the time domain to the natural numbers.

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On the interval-bound problem for weighted timed automata

Metric temporal logic (MTL) and timed propositional temporal logic (TPTL) are
quantitative extensions of linear temporal logic, which are prominent and
widely used in the verification of real-timed systems. It was recently shown
that the path checking problem for MTL, when evaluated over finite timed words,
is in the parallel complexity class NC. In this paper, we derive precise
complexity results for the path-checking problem for MTL and TPTL when
evaluated over infinite data words over the non-negative integers. Such words
may be seen as the behaviours of one-counter machines. For this setting, we
give a complete analysis of the complexity of the path-checking problem
depending on the number of register variables and the encoding of constraint
numbers (unary or binary). As the two main results, we prove that the
path-checking problem for MTL is P-complete, whereas the path-checking problem
for TPTL is PSPACE-complete. The results yield the precise complexity of model
checking deterministic one-counter machines against formulae of MTL and TPTL.

Path Checking for MTL and TPTL over Data Words

We aim to generalize Buchi'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.

MSO logics for weighted timed automata

With the purpose of unifying a number of approaches to energy problems found in the literature, we introduce generalized energy automata. These are finite automata whose edges are labeled with energy functions that define how energy levels evolve during transitions. Uncovering a close connection between energy problems and reachability and Buchi acceptance for semiring-weighted automata, we show that these generalized energy problems are decidable. We also provide complexity results for important special cases.

Karin Quaas

Papers

Universality Analysis for One-Clock Timed Automata

On the interval-bound problem for weighted timed automata

Path Checking for MTL and TPTL over Data Words

MSO logics for weighted timed automata

Kleene Algebras and Semimodules for Energy Problems