Abstract
The determinization of Büchi automata is a celebrated problem, with applications in synthesis, probabilistic verification, and multi-agent systems. Since the 1960s, there has been a steady progress of constructions: by McNaughton, Safra, Piterman, Schewe, and others. Despite the proliferation of solutions, they are all essentially ad-hoc constructions, with little theory behind them other than proofs of correctness. Since Safra, all optimal constructions employ trees as states of the deterministic automaton, and transitions between states are defined operationally over these trees. The operational nature of these constructions complicates understanding, implementing, and reasoning about them, and should be contrasted with complementation, where a solid theory in terms of automata run dags underlies modern constructions. In 2010, we described a profile-based approach to Büchi complementation, where a profile is simply the history of visits to accepting states. We developed a structural theory of profiles and used it to describe a complementation construction that is deterministic in the limit. Here we extend the theory of profiles to prove that every run dag contains a profile tree with at most a finite number of infinite branches. We then show that this property provides a theoretical grounding for a new determinization construction where macrostates are doubly preordered sets of states. In contrast to extant determinization constructions, transitions in the new construction are described declaratively rather than operationally.
Original language | American English |
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Pages (from-to) | 136-151 |
Number of pages | 16 |
Journal | Information and Computation |
Volume | 245 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Dec 2015 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Work supported in part by NSF grants CNS 1049862 and CCF-1139011 , by NSF Expeditions in Computing project “ExCAPE: Expeditions in Computer Augmented Program Engineering”, by a gift from Intel , by BSF grant 9800096 , and by a stipend from Trinity University .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Keywords
- Automata theory
- Büchi determinization
- Büchi profiles
- Omega-automata
- ω-automata