In this work we introduce new generalised quantifiers which allow us to express the Rabin-Mostowski index of automata. Our main results study expressive power and decidability of the monadic second-order (MSO) logic extended with these quantifiers. We study these problems in the realm of both ω-words and infinite trees. As it turns out, the pictures in these two cases are very different. In the case of ω-words the new quantifiers can be effectively expressed in pure MSO logic. In contrast, in the case of infinite trees, addition of these quantifiers leads to an undecidable formalism. To realise index-quantifier elimination, we consider the extension of MSO by game quantifiers. As a tool, we provide a specific quantifier-elimination procedure for them. Moreover, we introduce a novel construction of transducers realising strategies in ω-regular games with monadic parameters.

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We define the class of explorable automata on finite or infinite words. This is a generalization of History-Deterministic (HD) automata, where this time non-deterministic choices can be resolved by building finitely many simultaneous runs instead of just one. We show that recognizing HD parity automata of fixed index among explorable ones is in PTime, thereby giving a strong link between the two notions. We then show that recognizing explorable automata is ExpTime-complete, in the case of finite words or Büchi automata. Additionally, we define the notion of ω-explorable automata on infinite words, where countably many runs can be used to resolve the non-deterministic choices. We show that all reachability automata are ω-explorable, but this is not the case for safety ones. We finally show ExpTime-completeness for ω-explorability of automata on infinite words for the safety and co-Büchi acceptance conditions.

We study FO+, a fragment of first-order logic on finite words, where monadic predicates can only appear positively. We show that there is an FO-definable language that is monotone in monadic predicates but not definable in FO+. This provides a simple proof that Lyndon's preservation theorem fails on finite structures. We lift this example language to finite graphs, thereby providing a new result of independent interest for FO-definable graph classes: negation might be needed even when the class is closed under addition of edges. We finally show that the problem of whether a given regular language of finite words is definable in FO+ is undecidable.

We introduce a cyclic proof system for proving inclusions of transfinite expressions, describing languages of words of ordinal length. We show that recognising valid cyclic proofs is decidable, that our system is sound and complete, and well-behaved with respect to cuts. Moreover, cyclic proofs can be effectively computed from expressions inclusions. We show how to use this to obtain a Pspace algorithm for transfinite expression inclusion.

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We study FO+, a fragment of first-order logic on finite words, where monadic predicates can only appear positively. We show that there is an FO-definable language that is monotone in monadic predicates but not definable in FO+. This provides a simple proof that Lyndon's preservation theorem fails on finite structures. We additionally show that given a regular language, it is undecidable whether it is definable in FO+.

We propose a new algorithm for checking language equivalence of non-deterministic Büchi automata. We start from a construction proposed by Calbrix, Nivat and Podelski, which makes it possible to reduce the problem to that of checking equivalence of automata on finite words. Although this construction generates large and highly non-deterministic automata, we show how to exploit their specific structure and apply state-of-the art techniques based on coinduction to reduce the state-space that has to be explored. Doing so, we obtain algorithms which do not require full determinisation or complementation.

We study a cyclic proof system C over regular expression types, inspired by linear logic and non-wellfounded proof theory. Proofs in C can be seen as strongly typed goto programs. We show that they denote computable total functions and we analyse the relative strength of C and Gödel’s system T. In the general case, we prove that the two systems capture the same functions on natural numbers. In the affine case, i.e., when contraction is removed, we prove that they capture precisely the primitive recursive functions—providing an alternative and more general proof of a result by Dal Lago, about an affine version of system T. Without contraction, we manage to give a direct and uniform encoding of C into T, by analysing cycles and translating them into explicit recursions. Whether such a direct and uniform translation from C to T can be given in the presence of contraction remains open. We obtain the two upper bounds on the expressivity of C using a different technique: we formalise weak normalisation of a small step reduction semantics in subsystems of second-order arithmetic: ACA 0 and RCA 0 .

We study alternating parity good-for-games (GFG) automata, i.e., alternating parity automata where both conjunctive and disjunctive choices can be resolved in an online manner, without knowledge of the suffix of the input word still to be read. We show that they can be exponentially more succinct than both their nondeterministic and universal counterparts. Furthermore, we present a single exponential determinisation procedure and an Exptime upper bound to the problem of recognising whether an alternating automaton is GFG. We also study the complexity of deciding "half-GFGness", a property specific to alternating automata that only requires nondeterministic choices to be resolved in an online manner. We show that this problem is PSpace-hard already for alternating automata on finite words.

Abstract We study the Horn theories of Kleene algebras and star continuous Kleene algebras, from the complexity point of view. While their equational theories coincide and are PSpace-complete, their Horn theories differ and are undecidable. We characterise the Horn theory of star continuous Kleene algebras in terms of downward closed languages and we show that when restricting the shape of allowed hypotheses, the problems lie in various levels of the arithmetical or analytical hierarchy. We also answer a question posed by Cohen about hypotheses of the form $$1=S$$ where S is a sum of letters: we show that it is decidable.

We consider a fragment of a cyclic sequent proof system for Kleene algebra, and we see it as a computational device for recognising languages of words. The starting proof system is linear and we show that it captures precisely the regular languages. When adding the standard contraction rule, the expressivity raises significantly; we characterise the corresponding class of languages using a new notion of multi-head finite automata, where heads can jump.

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Good-for-Games (GFG) automata offer a compromise between deterministic and nondeterministic automata. They can resolve nondeterministic choices in a step-by-step fashion, without needing any information about the remaining suffix of the word. These automata can be used to solve games with omega-regular conditions, and in particular were introduced as a tool to solve Church's synthesis problem. We focus here on the problem of recognizing Büchi GFG automata, that we call Büchi GFGness problem: given a nondeterministic Büchi automaton, is it GFG? We show that this problem can be decided in P, and more precisely in O(n^4m^2|Sigma|^2), where n is the number of states, m the number of transitions and |Sigma| is the size of the alphabet. We conjecture that a very similar algorithm solves the problem in polynomial time for any fixed parity acceptance condition.

We introduce a measure called width, quantifying the amount of nondeterminism in automata. Width generalises the notion of good-for-games (GFG) automata, that correspond to NFAs of width 1, and where an accepting run can be built on-the-fly on any accepted input. We describe an incremental determinisation construction on NFAs, which can be more efficient than the full powerset determinisation, depending on the width of the input NFA. This construction can be generalised to infinite words, and is particularly well-suited to coBüchi automata in this context. For coBüchi automata, this procedure can be used to compute either a deterministic automaton or a GFG one, and it is algorithmically more efficient in this last case. We show this fact by proving that checking whether a coBüchi automaton is determinisable by pruning is NP-complete. On finite or infinite words, we show that computing the width of an automaton is PSPACE-hard.

Negotiations are a formalism for describing multiparty distributed cooperation. Alternatively, they can be seen as a model of concurrency with synchronized choice as communication primitive. Well-designed negotiations must be sound, meaning that, whatever its current state, the negotiation can still be completed. In earlier work, Esparza and Desel have shown that deciding soundness of a negotiation is Pspace-complete, and in Ptime if the negotiation is deterministic. They have also extended their polynomial soundness algorithm to an intermediate class of acyclic, non-deterministic negotiations. However, they did not analyze the runtime of the extended algorithm, and also left open the complexity of the soundness problem for the intermediate class. In the first part of this paper we revisit the soundness problem for deterministic negotiations, and show that it is Nlogspace-complete, improving on the earlier algorithm, which requires linear space. In the second part we answer the question left open by Esparza and Desel. We prove that the soundness problem can be solved in polynomial time for acyclic, weakly non- deterministic negotiations, a more general class than the one considered by them. In the third and final part, we show that the techniques developed in the first two parts of the paper can be applied to analysis problems other than soundness, including the problem of detecting race conditions, and several classical static analysis problems. More specifically, we show that, while these problems are intractable for arbitrary acyclic deterministic negotiations, they become tractable in the sound case. So soundness is not only a desirable behavioral property in itself, but also helps to analyze other properties.

Negotiations are a formalism for describing multiparty distributed cooperation. Alternatively, they can be seen as a model of concurrency with synchronized choice as communication primitive. Well-designed negotiations must be sound, meaning that, whatever its current state, the negotiation can still be completed. In a former paper, Esparza and Desel have shown that deciding soundness of a negotiation is PSPACE-complete, and in PTIME if the negotiation is deterministic. They have also provided an algorithm for an intermediate class of acyclic, non-deterministic negotiations, but left the complexity of the soundness problem open. In the first part of this paper we study two further analysis problems for sound acyclic deterministic negotiations, called the race and the omission problem, and give polynomial algorithms. We use these results to provide the first polynomial algorithm for some analysis problems of workflow nets with data previously studied by Trcka, van der Aalst, and Sidorova. In the second part we solve the open question of Esparza and Desel's paper. We show that soundness of acyclic, weakly non-deterministic negotiations is in PTIME, and that checking soundness is already NP-complete for slightly more general classes.

Model-checking is increasingly popular in the early phases of the software development process. To establish the correctness of a software design one must usually verify both structural and behavioral (or temporal) properties. Unfortunately, most specification languages, and accompanying model-checkers, excel only in analyzing either one or the other kind. This limits their ability to verify dynamic systems with rich configurations: systems whose state space is characterized by rich structural properties, but whose evolution is also expected to satisfy certain temporal properties.

Regular cost functions form a quantitative extension of regular languages that share the array of characterisations the latter possess. In this theory, functions are treated only up to preservation of boundedness on all subsets of the domain. In this work, we subject the well known distance automata (also called min-automata), and their dual max-automata to this framework, and obtain a number of effective characterisations in terms of logic, expressions and algebra.

Regular cost functions were introduced as a quantitative generalisation of regular languages, retaining many of their equivalent characterisations and decidability properties. For instance, stabilisation monoids play the same role for cost functions as monoids do for regular languages. The purpose of this article is to further extend this algebraic approach by generalising two results on regular languages to cost functions: Eilenberg's varieties theorem and profinite equational characterisations of lattices of regular languages. This opens interesting new perspectives, but the specificities of cost functions introduce difficulties that prevent these generalisations to be straightforward. In contrast, although syntactic algebras can be defined for formal power series over a commutative ring, no such notion is known for series over semirings and in particular over the tropical semiring.

In FSTTCS 2014, we introduced sensing as a new complexity measure for the complexity of regular languages. Intuitively, the sensing cost quantifies the detail in which a random input word has to be read by a deterministic automaton in order to decide its membership in the language. In this paper, we consider sensing in two principal applications of deterministic automata. The first is monitoring: we are given a computation in an on-line manner, and we have to decide whether it satisfies the specification. The second is synthesis: we are given a sequence of inputs in an on-line manner and we have to generate a sequence of outputs so that the resulting computation satisfies the specification. In the first, our goal is to design a monitor that handles all computations and minimizes the expected average number of sensors used in the monitoring process. In the second, our goal is to design a transducer that realizes the specification for all input sequences and minimizes the expected average number of sensors used for reading the inputs. We argue that the two applications require new and different frameworks for reasoning about sensing, and develop such frameworks. We focus on safety languages. We show that for monitoring, minimal sensing is attained by a monitor based on the minimal deterministic automaton for the language. For synthesis, however, the setting is more challenging: minimizing the sensing may require exponentially bigger transducers, and the problem of synthesizing a minimally-sensing transducer is EXPTIME-complete even for safety specifications given by deterministic automata.

Weakly definable languages of infinite trees are an expressive subclass of regular tree languages definable in terms of weak monadic second-order logic, or equivalently weak alternating automata. Our main result is that given a Büchi automaton, it is decidable whether the language is weakly definable. We also show that given a parity automaton, it is decidable whether the language is recognizable by a nondeterministic co-Büchi automaton. The decidability proofs build on recent results about cost automata over infinite trees. These automata use counters to define functions from infinite trees to the natural numbers extended with infinity. We reduce to testing whether the functions defined by certain "quasi-weak" cost automata are bounded by a finite value.

Cost automata have a finite set of counters which can be manipulated on each transition but do not affect control flow. Based on the evolution of the counter values, these automata define functions from a domain like words or trees to \N \cup \set{\infty}, modulo an equivalence relation which ignores exact values but preserves boundedness properties. These automata have been studied by Colcombet et al. as part of a "theory of regular cost functions", an extension of the theory of regular languages which retains robust equivalences, closure properties, and decidability like the classical theory. We extend this theory by introducing quasi-weak cost automata. Unlike traditional weak automata which have a hard-coded bound on the number of alternations between accepting and rejecting states, quasi-weak automata bound the alternations using the counter values (which can vary across runs). We show that these automata are strictly more expressive than weak cost automata over infinite trees. The main result is a Rabin-style characterization theorem: a function is quasi-weak definable if and only if it is definable using two dual forms of non-deterministic Büchi cost automata. This yields a new decidability result for cost functions over infinite trees.

Regular cost functions have been introduced recently as an extension to the notion of regular languages with counting capabilities, which retains strong closure, equivalence, and decidability properties. The specificity of cost functions is that exact values are not considered, but only estimated. In this paper, we define an extension of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) over finite words to describe cost functions. We give an explicit translation from this new logic to two dual form of cost automata, and we show that the natural decision problems for this logic are PSPACE-complete, as it is the case in the classical setting. We then algebraically characterize the expressive power of this logic, using a new syntactic congruence for cost functions introduced in this paper.