Formal Languages and Automata Theory
We show that the language equivalence problem for regular and context-free commutative grammars is coNEXP-complete. In addition, our lower bound immediately yields further coNEXP-completeness results for equivalence problems for…
Nested words introduced by Alur and Madhusudan are used to capture structures with both linear and hierarchical order, e.g. XML documents, without losing valuable closure properties. Furthermore, Alur and Madhusudan introduced automata and…
In formal language theory, several different models characterize regular languages, such as finite automata, congruences of finite index, or monadic second-order logic (MSO). Moreover, several fragments of MSO have effective…
Weighted timed automata (WTA) model quantitative aspects of real-time systems like continuous consumption of memory, power or financial resources. They accept quantitative timed languages where every timed word is mapped to a value, e.g., a…
The paper is devoted to two types of algebraic models of automata. The usual (first type) model leads to the developed decomposition theory (Krohn-Rhodes theory). We introduce another type of automata model and study how these automata are…
We address the problem of verifying timed properties of Markovian models of large populations of interacting agents, modelled as finite state automata. In particular, we focus on time-bounded properties of (random) individual agents…
In this paper we propose a research programme for getting structural characterisations for 2-dimensional languages generated by self-assembling tiles. This is part of a larger programme on getting a formal foundation of parallel,…
We study programs with integer data, procedure calls and arbitrary call graphs. We show that, whenever the guards and updates are given by octagonal relations, the reachability problem along control flow paths within some language w1* ...…
Context-free language theory is a well-established area of mathematics, relevant to computer science foundations and technology. This paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing formalization project using context-free grammars and…
XML is a standard and universal language for representing information. XML processing is supported by two key frameworks: DOM and SAX. SAX is efficient, but leaves the developer to encode much of the processing. This paper introduces a…
The syntactic semigroup problem is to decide whether a given finite semigroup is syntactic or not. This work investigates the syntactic semigroup problem for both the semigroup reducts of $A^+(B_n)$, the affine near-semiring over a Brandt…
In this paper, we extend the notion of tree language quotients to bottom-up quotients. Instead of computing the residual of a tree language from top to bottom and producing a list of tree languages, we show how to compute a set of k-ary…
For a non-negative integer $k$, a language is $k$-piecewise test\-able ($k$-PT) if it is a finite boolean combination of languages of the form $\Sigma^* a_1 \Sigma^* \cdots \Sigma^* a_n \Sigma^*$ for $a_i\in\Sigma$ and $0\le n \le k$. We…
The \v{C}ern\'y conjecture states that every $n$-state synchronizing automaton has a reset word of length at most $(n-1)^2$. We study the hardness of finding short reset words. It is known that the exact version of the problem, i.e.,…
We consider the problem of random uniform generation of traces (the elements of a free partially commutative monoid) in light of the uniform measure on the boundary at infinity of the associated monoid. We obtain a product decomposition of…
Synthesis is a particularly challenging problem for concurrent programs. At the same time it is a very promising approach, since concurrent programs are difficult to get right, or to analyze with traditional verification techniques. This…
Higher-dimensional automata constitute a very expressive model for concurrent systems. In this paper, we discuss "topological abstraction" of higher-dimensional automata, i.e., the replacement of HDAs by smaller ones that can be considered…
We present the first study of robustness of systems that are both timed as well as reactive (I/O). We study the behavior of such timed I/O systems in the presence of "uncertain inputs" and formalize their robustness using the analytic…
We answer an open question in the theory of degrees of infinite sequences with respect to transducibility by finite-state transducers. An initial study of this partial order of degrees was carried out in (Endrullis, Hendriks, Klop, 2011),…
Atoms of a (regular) language $L$ were introduced by Brzozowski and Tamm in 2011 as intersections of complemented and uncomplemented quotients of $L$. They derived tight upper bounds on the complexity of atoms in 2013. In 2014, Brzozowski…