No Arabic abstract
Stochastic games combine controllable and adversarial non-determinism with stochastic behavior and are a common tool in control, verification and synthesis of reactive systems facing uncertainty. Multi-objective stochastic games are natural in situations where several - possibly conflicting - performance criteria like time and energy consumption are relevant. Such conjunctive combinations are the most studied multi-objective setting in the literature. In this paper, we consider the dual disjunctive problem. More concretely, we study turn-based stochastic two-player games on graphs where the winning condition is to guarantee at least one reachability or safety objective from a given set of alternatives. We present a fine-grained overview of strategy and computational complexity of such emph{disjunctive queries} (DQs) and provide new lower and upper bounds for several variants of the problem, significantly extending previous works. We also propose a novel value iteration-style algorithm for approximating the set of Pareto optimal thresholds for a given DQ.
We study turn-based stochastic zero-sum games with lexicographic preferences over reachability and safety objectives. Stochastic games are standard models in control, verification, and synthesis of stochastic reactive systems that exhibit both randomness as well as angelic and demonic non-determinism. Lexicographic order allows to consider multiple objectives with a strict preference order over the satisfaction of the objectives. To the best of our knowledge, stochastic games with lexicographic objectives have not been studied before. We establish determinacy of such games and present strategy and computational complexity results. For strategy complexity, we show that lexicographically optimal strategies exist that are deterministic and memory is only required to remember the already satisfied and violated objectives. For a constant number of objectives, we show that the relevant decision problem is in NP $cap$ coNP, matching the current known bound for single objectives; and in general the decision problem is PSPACE-hard and can be solved in NEXPTIME $cap$ coNEXPTIME. We present an algorithm that computes the lexicographically optimal strategies via a reduction to computation of optimal strategies in a sequence of single-objectives games. We have implemented our algorithm and report experimental results on various case studies.
We consider the complexity properties of modern puzzle games, Hexiom, Cut the Rope and Back to Bed. The complexity of games plays an important role in the type of experience they provide to players. Back to Bed is shown to be PSPACE-Hard and the first two are shown to be NP-Hard. These results give further insight into the structure of these games and the resulting constructions may be useful in further complexity studies.
Games on graphs provide a natural and powerful model for reactive systems. In this paper, we consider generalized reachability objectives, defined as conjunctions of reachability objectives. We first prove that deciding the winner in such games is $PSPACE$-complete, although it is fixed-parameter tractable with the number of reachability objectives as parameter. Moreover, we consider the memory requirements for both players and give matching upper and lower bounds on the size of winning strategies. In order to allow more efficient algorithms, we consider subclasses of generalized reachability games. We show that bounding the size of the reachability sets gives two natural subclasses where deciding the winner can be done efficiently.
The use of monotonicity and Tarskis theorem in existence proofs of equilibria is very widespread in economics, while Tarskis theorem is also often used for similar purposes in the context of verification. However, there has been relatively little in the way of analysis of the complexity of finding the fixed points and equilibria guaranteed by this result. We study a computational formalism based on monotone functions on the $d$-dimensional grid with sides of length $N$, and their fixed points, as well as the closely connected subject of supermodular games and their equilibria. It is known that finding some (any) fixed point of a monotone function can be done in time $log^d N$, and we show it requires at least $log^2 N$ function evaluations already on the 2-dimensional grid, even for randomized algorithms. We show that the general Tarski problem of finding some fixed point, when the monotone function is given succinctly (by a boolean circuit), is in the class PLS of problems solvable by local search and, rather surprisingly, also in the class PPAD. Finding the greatest or least fixed point guaranteed by Tarskis theorem, however, requires $dcdot N$ steps, and is NP-hard in the white box model. For supermodular games, we show that finding an equilibrium in such games is essentially computationally equivalent to the Tarski problem, and finding the maximum or minimum equilibrium is similarly harder. Interestingly, two-player supermodular games where the strategy space of one player is one-dimensional can be solved in $O(log N)$ steps. We also observe that computing (approximating) the value of Condons (Shapleys) stochastic games reduces to the Tarski problem. An important open problem highlighted by this work is proving a $Omega(log^d N)$ lower bound for small fixed dimension $d geq 3$.
This paper develops a Multiset Rewriting language with explicit time for the specification and analysis of Time-Sensitive Distributed Systems (TSDS). Goals are often specified using explicit time constraints. A good trace is an infinite trace in which the goals are satisfied perpetually despite possible interference from the environment. In our previous work (FORMATS 2016), we discussed two desirable properties of TSDSes, realizability (there exists a good trace) and survivability (where, in addition, all admissible traces are good). Here we consider two additional properties, recoverability (all compliant traces do not reach points-of-no-return) and reliability (the system can always continue functioning using a good trace). Following (FORMATS 2016), we focus on a class of systems called Progressing Timed Systems (PTS), where intuitively only a finite number of actions can be carried out in a bounded time period. We prove that for this class of systems the properties of recoverability and reliability coincide and are PSPACE-complete. Moreover, if we impose a bound on time (as in bounded model-checking), we show that for PTS the reliability property is in the $Pi_2^p$ class of the polynomial hierarchy, a subclass of PSPACE. We also show that the bounded survivability is both NP-hard and coNP-hard.