Bu̧chi complementation made tighter

The complementation problem for nondeterministic word automata has numerous applications in formal verification. In particular, the language-containment problem, to which many verification problems is reduced, involves complementation. For automata on finite words, which correspond to safety properties, complementation involves determinization. The 2ⁿ blow-up that is caused by the subset construction is justified by a tight lower bound. For Büchi automata on infinite words, which are required for the modeling of liveness properties, optimal complementation constructions are quite complicated, as the subset construction is not sufficient. From a theoretical point of view, the problem is considered solved since 1988, when Safra came up with a determinization construction for Büchi automata, leading to a 2 ^o(nlogn) complementation construction, and Michel came up with a matching lower bound. A careful analysis, however, of the exact blow-up in Safra's and Michel's bounds reveals an exponential gap in the constants hiding in the O() notations: while the upper bound on the number of states in Safra's complementary automaton is n²ⁿ, Michel's lower bound involves only an n! blow up, which is roughly (n/e)ⁿ. The exponential gap exists also in more recent complementation constructions. In particular, the upper bound on the number of states in the complementation construction of Kupferman and Vardi, which avoids determinization, is (6n)ⁿ. This is in contrast with the case of automata on finite words, where the upper and lower bounds coincides. In this work we describe an improved complementation construction for nondeterministic Büchi automata and analyze its complexity. We show that the new construction results in an automaton with at most (0.96n)ⁿ states. While this leaves the problem about the exact blow up open, the gap is now exponentially smaller. From a practical point of view, our solution enjoys the simplicity of the construction of Kupferman and Vardi, and results in much smaller automata.