No Arabic abstract
We develop new algebraic tools to reason about concurrent behaviours modelled as languages of Mazurkiewicz traces and asynchronous automata. These tools reflect the distributed nature of traces and the underlying causality and concurrency between events, and can be said to support true concurrency. They generalize the tools that have been so efficient in understanding, classifying and reasoning about word languages. In particular, we introduce an asynchronous version of the wreath product operation and we describe the trace languages recognized by such products (the so-called asynchronous wreath product principle). We then propose a decomposition result for recognizable trace languages, analogous to the Krohn-Rhodes theorem, and we prove this decomposition result in the special case of acyclic architectures. Finally, we introduce and analyze two distributed automata-theoretic operations. One, the local cascade product, is a direct implementation of the asynchronous wreath product operation. The other, global cascade sequences, although conceptually and operationally similar to the local cascade product, translates to a more complex asynchronous implementation which uses the gossip automaton of Mukund and Sohoni. This leads to interesting applications to the characterization of trace languages definable in first-order logic: they are accepted by a restricted local cascade product of the gossip automaton and 2-state asynchronous reset automata, and also by a global cascade sequence of 2-state asynchronous reset automata. Over distributed alphabets for which the asynchronous Krohn-Rhodes theorem holds, a local cascade product of such automata is sufficient and this, in turn, leads to the identification of a simple temporal logic which is expressively complete for such alphabets.
We develop a new algebraic framework to reason about languages of Mazurkiewicz traces. This framework supports true concurrency and provides a non-trivial generalization of the wreath product operation to the trace setting. A novel local wreath product principle has been established. The new framework is crucially used to propose a decomposition result for recognizable trace languages, which is an analogue of the Krohn-Rhodes theorem. We prove this decomposition result in the special case of acyclic architectures and apply it to extend Kamps theorem to this setting. We also introduce and analyze distributed automata-theoretic operations called local and global cascade products. Finally, we show that aperiodic trace languages can be characterized using global cascade products of localized and distributed two-state reset automata.
It is an open problem whether definability in Propositional Dynamic Logic (PDL) on forests is decidable. Based on an algebraic characterization by Bojanczyk, et. al.,(2012) in terms of forest algebras, Straubing (2013) described an approach to PDL based on a k-fold iterated distributive law. A proof that all languages satisfying such a k-fold iterated distributive law are in PDL would settle decidability of PDL. We solve this problem in the case k=2: All languages recognized by forest algebras satisfying a 2-fold iterated distributive law are in PDL. Furthermore, we show that this class is decidable. This provides a novel nontrivial decidable subclass of PDL, and demonstrates the viability of the proposed approach to deciding PDL in general.
We investigate the $alpha$-colored Eulerian polynomials and a notion of descents introduced in a recent paper of Hedmark and show that such polynomials can be computed as a polynomial encoding descents computed over a quotient of the wreath product $mathbb{Z}_alphawrmathfrak{S}_n$. Moreover, we consider the flag descent statistic computed over this same quotient and find that the flag Eulerian polynomial remains palindromic. We prove that the flag descent polynomial is palindromic over this same quotient by giving a combinatorial proof that the flag descent statistic is symmetrically distributed over the collection of colored permutations with fixed last color by way of a new combinatorial tool, the colored winding number of a colored permutation. We conclude with some conjectures, observations, and open questions.
We present a comprehensive language theoretic causality analysis framework for explaining safety property violations in the setting of concurrent reactive systems. Our framework allows us to uniformly express a number of causality notions studied in the areas of artificial intelligence and formal methods, as well as define new ones that are of potential interest in these areas. Furthermore, our formalization provides means for reasoning about the relationships between individual notions which have mostly been considered independently in prior work; and allows us to judge the appropriateness of the different definitions for various applications in system design. In particular, we consider causality analysis notions for debugging, error resilience, and liability resolution in concurrent reactive systems. Finally, we present automata-based algorithms for computing various causal sets based on our language-theoretic encoding, and derive the algorithmic complexities.
We consider the task of controlling in a distributed way a Zielonka asynchronous automaton. Every process of a controller has access to its causal past to determine the next set of actions it proposes to play. An action can be played only if every process controlling this action proposes to play it. We consider reachability objectives: every process should reach its set of final states. We show that this control problem is decidable for tree architectures, where every process can communicate with its parent, its children, and with the environment. The complexity of our algorithm is l-fold exponential with l being the height of the tree representing the architecture. We show that this is unavoidable by showing that even for three processes the problem is EXPTIME-complete, and that it is non-elementary in general.