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Paul Gastin

Publications and source records attributed to Paul Gastin.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

TEMPORA: Efficient Verification of Metric Temporal Properties with Past in Pointwise Semantics

Model checking for real-timed systems is a rich and diverse topic. Among the different logics considered, Metric Interval Temporal Logic (MITL) is a powerful and commonly used logic, which can succinctly encode many interesting timed properties especially when past and future modalities are used together. In this work, we develop a new approach for MITL model checking in the pointwise semantics, where our focus is on integrating past and maximizing determinism in the translated automata. Towards this goal, we define synchronous networks of timed automata with shared variables and show that the past fragment of MITL can be translated in linear time to synchronous networks of deterministic timed automata. Moreover determinism can be preserved even when the logic is extended with future modalities at the top-level of the formula. We further extend this approach to the full MITL with past, translating it into networks of generalized timed automata (GTA) with future clocks (which extend timed automata and event clock automata). We present an SCC-based liveness algorithm to analyse GTA. We implement our translation in a prototype tool which handles both finite and infinite timed words and supports past modalities. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in MITL satisfiability checking in pointwise semantics on a benchmark suite of 72 formulas. Finally, we implement an end-to-end model checking algorithm for pointwise semantics and demonstrate its effectiveness on two well-known benchmarks.

cs.FL

Games on Graphs: From Logic and Automata to Algorithms

The objective of this book is to give a comprehensive presentation of the research field concerned with infinite duration games on graphs. Historically, these game models appeared in the study of automata and logic, and they later became important for program verification and synthesis. They have many more applications, in particular some of the models investigated in this book were introduced and studied in neighbouring research communities such as optimisation, reinforcement learning, model theory, and set theory.

cs.GT

MITL Model Checking via Generalized Timed Automata and a New Liveness Algorithm

The translation of Metric Interval Temporal Logic (MITL) to timed automata is a topic that has been extensively studied. A key challenge here is the conversion of future modalities into equivalent automata. Typical conversions equip the automata with a guess-and-check mechanism to ascertain the truth of future modalities. Guess-and-check can be naturally implemented via alternation. However, since timed automata tools do not handle alternation, existing methods perform an additional step of converting the alternating timed automata into timed automata. This de-alternation step proceeds by an intricate finite abstraction of the space of configurations of the alternating automaton. Recently, a model of generalized timed automata (GTA) has been proposed. The model comes with several powerful additional features, and yet, the best known zone-based reachability algorithms for timed automata have been extended to the GTA model, with the same complexity for all the zone operations. We provide a new concise translation from MITL to GTA. In particular, for the timed until modality, our translation offers an exponential improvement w.r.t. the state-of-the-art. Thanks to this conversion, MITL model checking reduces to checking liveness for GTAs. However, no liveness algorithm is known for GTAs. Due to the presence of future clocks, there is no finite time-abstract bisimulation (region equivalence) for GTAs, whereas liveness algorithms for timed automata crucially rely on the presence of the finite region equivalence. As our second contribution, we provide a new zone-based algorithm for checking Buchi non-emptiness in GTAs, which circumvents this fundamental challenge.

cs.FL

Reversible Pebble Transducers

Deterministic two-way transducers with pebbles (aka pebble transducers) capture the class of polyregular functions, which extend the string-to-string regular functions allowing polynomial growth instead of linear growth. One of the most fundamental operations on functions is composition, and (poly)regular functions can be realized as a composition of several simpler functions. In general, composition of deterministic two-way transducers incur a doubly exponential blow-up in the size of the inputs. A major improvement in this direction comes from the fundamental result of Dartois et al. [10] showing a polynomial construction for the composition of reversible two-way transducers. A precise complexity analysis for existing composition techniques of pebble transducers is missing. But they rely on the classic composition of two-way transducers and inherit the double exponential complexity. To overcome this problem, we introduce reversible pebble transducers. Our main results are efficient uniformization techniques for non-deterministic pebble transducers to reversible ones and efficient composition for reversible pebble transducers.

cs.FL

High-Level Message Sequence Charts: Satisfiability and Realizability Revisited

Message sequence charts (MSCs) visually represent interactions in distributed systems that communicate through FIFO channels. High-level MSCs (HMSCs) extend MSCs with choice, concatenation, and iteration, allowing for the specification of complex behaviors. This paper revisits two classical problems for HMSCs: satisfiability and realizability. Satisfiability (also known as reachability or nonemptiness) asks whether there exists a path in the HMSC that gives rise to a valid behavior. Realizability concerns translating HMSCs into communicating finite-state machines to ensure correct system implementations. While most positive results assume bounded channels, we introduce a class of HMSCs that allows for unbounded channels while maintaining effective implementations. On the other hand, we show that the corresponding satisfiability problem is still undecidable.

cs.LO

Simulations for Event-Clock Automata

Event-clock automata (ECA) are a well-known semantic subclass of timed automata (TA) which enjoy admirable theoretical properties, e.g., determinizability, and are practically useful to capture timed specifications. However, unlike for timed automata, there exist no implementations for checking non-emptiness of event-clock automata. As ECAs contain special prophecy clocks that guess and maintain the time to the next occurrence of specific events, they cannot be seen as a syntactic subclass of TA. Therefore, implementations for TA cannot be directly used for ECAs, and moreover the translation of an ECA to a semantically equivalent TA is expensive. Another reason for the lack of ECA implementations is the difficulty in adapting zone-based algorithms, critical in the timed automata setting, to the event-clock automata setting. This difficulty was studied by Geeraerts et al. in 2011, where the authors proposed a zone enumeration procedure that uses zone extrapolations for finiteness. In this article, we propose a different zone-based algorithm to solve the reachability problem for event-clock automata, using simulations for finiteness. A surprising consequence of our result is that for event-predicting automata, the subclass of event-clock automata that only use prophecy clocks, we obtain finiteness even without any simulations. For general event-clock automata, our new algorithm exploits the G-simulation framework, which is the coarsest known simulation relation in timed automata literature, and has been recently used for advances in other extensions of timed automata.

cs.FL

Reversible Transducers over Infinite Words

Deterministic two-way transducers capture the class of regular functions. The efficiency of composing two-way transducers has a direct implication in algorithmic problems related to reactive synthesis, where transformation specifications are converted into equivalent transducers. These specifications are presented in a modular way, and composing the resultant machines simulates the full specification. An important result by Dartois et al. shows that composition of two-way transducers enjoy a polynomial composition when the underlying transducer is reversible, that is, if they are both deterministic and co-deterministic. This is a major improvement over general deterministic two-way transducers, for which composition causes a doubly exponential blow-up in the size of the inputs in general. Moreover, they show that reversible two-way transducers have the same expressiveness as deterministic two-way transducers. However, the question of expressiveness of reversible transducers over infinite words is still open. In this article, we introduce the class of reversible two-way transducers over infinite words and show that they enjoy the same expressive power as deterministic two-way transducers over infinite words. This is done through a non-trivial, effective construction inducing a single exponential blow-up in the set of states. Further, we also prove that composing two reversible two-way transducers over infinite words incurs only a polynomial complexity, thereby providing foundations for efficient procedure for composition of transducers over infinite words.

cs.FL

Propositional dynamic logic and asynchronous cascade decompositions for regular trace languages

We propose a local, past-oriented fragment of propositional dynamic logic to reason about concurrent scenarios modelled as Mazurkiewicz traces, and prove it to be expressively complete with respect to regular trace languages. Because of locality, specifications in this logic are efficiently translated into asynchronous automata, in a way that reflects the structure of formulas. In particular, we obtain a new proof of Zielonka's fundamental theorem and we prove that any regular trace language can be implemented by a cascade product of localized asynchronous automata, which essentially operate on a single process. These results refine earlier results by Adsul et al. which involved a larger fragment of past propositional dynamic logic and used Mukund and Sohoni's gossip automaton. Our new results avoid using this automaton, or Zielonka's timestamping mechanism and, in particular, they show how to implement a gossip automaton as a cascade product.

cs.FL

A Unified Model for Real-Time Systems: Symbolic Techniques and Implementation

In this paper, we consider a model of generalized timed automata (GTA) with two kinds of clocks, history and future, that can express many timed features succinctly, including timed automata, event-clock automata with and without diagonal constraints, and automata with timers. Our main contribution is a new simulation-based zone algorithm for checking reachability in this unified model. While such algorithms are known to exist for timed automata, and have recently been shown for event-clock automata without diagonal constraints, this is the first result that can handle event-clock automata with diagonal constraints and automata with timers. We also provide a prototype implementation for our model and show experimental results on several benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effective implementation not just for our unified model, but even just for automata with timers or for event-clock automata (with predicting clocks) without going through a costly translation via timed automata. Last but not least, beyond being interesting in their own right, generalized timed automata can be used for model-checking event-clock specifications over timed automata models.

cs.FL

Zone-based verification of timed automata: extrapolations, simulations and what next?

Timed automata have been introduced by Rajeev Alur and David Dill in the early 90's. In the last decades, timed automata have become the de facto model for the verification of real-time systems. Algorithms for timed automata are based on the traversal of their state-space using zones as a symbolic representation. Since the state-space is infinite, termination relies on finite abstractions that yield a finite representation of the reachable states. The first solution to get finite abstractions was based on extrapolations of zones, and has been implemented in the industry-strength tool Uppaal. A different approach based on simulations between zones has emerged in the last ten years, and has been implemented in the fully open source tool TChecker. The simulation-based approach has led to new efficient algorithms for reachability and liveness in timed automata, and has also been extended to richer models like weighted timed automata, and timed automata with diagonal constraints and updates. In this article, we survey the extrapolation and simulation techniques, and discuss some open challenges for the future.

cs.LO

Asynchronous wreath product and cascade decompositions for concurrent behaviours

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.

cs.FL

Efficient Construction of Reversible Transducers from Regular Transducer Expressions

The class of regular transformations has several equivalent characterizations such as functional MSO transductions, deterministic two-way transducers, streaming string transducers, as well as regular transducer expressions (RTE). For algorithmic applications, it is very common and useful to transform a specification, here, an RTE, to a machine, here, a transducer. In this paper, we give an efficient construction of a two-way reversible transducer (2RFT) equivalent to a given RTE. 2RFTs are a well behaved class of transducers which are deterministic and co-deterministic (hence allows evaluation in linear time \wrt the input word), and where composition has only polynomial complexity. We show that, for full RTE, the constructed 2RFT has size doubly exponential in the size of the expression, while, if the RTE does not use Hadamard product or chained-star, the constructed 2RFT has size exponential in the size of the RTE.

cs.FL

Non-Sequential Theory of Distributed Systems

These lecture notes cover basic automata-theoretic concepts and logical formalisms for the modeling and verification of concurrent and distributed systems. Many of these concepts naturally extend the classical automata and logics over words, which provide a framework for modeling sequential systems. A distributed system, on the other hand, combines several (finite or recursive) processes, and will therefore be modeled as a collection of (finite or pushdown, respectively) automata. A crucial parameter of a distributed system is the kind of interaction that is allowed between processes. In this lecture, we focus on the message-passing paradigm. In general, communication in a distributed system creates complex dependencies between events, which are hidden when using a sequential, operational semantics. The approach taken here is based on a faithful preservation of the dependencies of concurrent events. That is, an execution of a system is modeled as a partial order, or graph, rather than a sequence of events.

cs.LO

Fast zone-based algorithms for reachability in pushdown timed automata

Given the versatility of timed automata a huge body of work has evolved that considers extensions of timed automata. One extension that has received a lot of interest is timed automata with a, possibly unbounded, stack, also called the pushdown timed automata (PDTA) model. While different algorithms have been given for reachability in different variants of this model, most of these results are purely theoretical and do not give rise to efficient implementations. One main reason for this is that none of these algorithms (and the implementations that exist) use the so-called zone-based abstraction, but rely either on the region-abstraction or other approaches, which are significantly harder to implement. In this paper, we show that a naive extension of the zone based reachability algorithm for the control state reachability problem of timed automata is not sound in the presence of a stack. To understand this better we give an inductive rule based view of the zone reachability algorithm for timed automata. This alternate view allows us to analyze and adapt the rules to also work for pushdown timed automata. We obtain the first zone-based algorithm for PDTA which is terminating, sound and complete. We implement our algorithm in the tool TChecker and perform experiments to show its efficacy, thus leading the way for more practical approaches to the verification of pushdown timed systems.

cs.FL

SD-Regular Transducer Expressions for Aperiodic Transformations

FO transductions, aperiodic deterministic two-way transducers, as well as aperiodic streaming string transducers are all equivalent models for first order definable functions. In this paper, we solve the long standing open problem of expressions capturing first order definable functions, thereby generalizing the seminal SF=AP (star free expressions = aperiodic languages) result of Schützenberger. Our result also generalizes a lesser known characterization by Schützenberger of aperiodic languages by SD-regular expressions (SD=AP). We show that every first order definable function over finite words captured by an aperiodic deterministic two-way transducer can be described with an SD-regular transducer expression (SDRTE). An SDRTE is a regular expression where Kleene stars are used in a restricted way: they can appear only on aperiodic languages which are prefix codes of bounded synchronization delay. SDRTEs are constructed from simple functions using the combinators unambiguous sum (deterministic choice), Hadamard product, and unambiguous versions of the Cauchy product and the k-chained Kleene-star, where the star is restricted as mentioned. In order to construct an SDRTE associated with an aperiodic deterministic two-way transducer, (i) we concretize Schützenberger's SD=AP result, by proving that aperiodic languages are captured by SD-regular expressions which are unambiguous and stabilising; (ii) by structural induction on the unambiguous, stabilising SD-regular expressions describing the domain of the transducer, we construct SDRTEs. Finally, we also look at various formalisms equivalent to SDRTEs which use the function composition, allowing to trade the k-chained star for a 1-star.

cs.FL

Weighted Tiling Systems for Graphs: Evaluation Complexity

We consider weighted tiling systems to represent functions from graphs to a commutative semiring such as the Natural semiring or the Tropical semiring. The system labels the nodes of a graph by its states, and checks if the neighbourhood of every node belongs to a set of permissible tiles, and assigns a weight accordingly. The weight of a labeling is the semiring-product of the weights assigned to the nodes, and the weight of the graph is the semiring-sum of the weights of labelings. We show that we can model interesting algorithmic questions using this formalism - like computing the clique number of a graph or computing the permanent of a matrix. The evaluation problem is, given a weighted tiling system and a graph, to compute the weight of the graph. We study the complexity of the evaluation problem and give tight upper and lower bounds for several commutative semirings. Further we provide an efficient evaluation algorithm if the input graph is of bounded tree-width.

cs.FL

Reachability for Updatable Timed Automata made faster and more effective

Updatable timed automata (UTA) are extensions of classic timed automata that allow special updates to clock variables, like x:= x - 1, x := y + 2, etc., on transitions. Reachability for UTA is undecidable in general. Various subclasses with decidable reachability have been studied. A generic approach to UTA reachability consists of two phases: first, a static analysis of the automaton is performed to compute a set of clock constraints at each state; in the second phase, reachable sets of configurations, called zones, are enumerated. In this work, we improve the algorithm for the static analysis. Compared to the existing algorithm, our method computes smaller sets of constraints and guarantees termination for more UTA, making reachability faster and more effective. As the main application, we get an alternate proof of decidability and a more efficient algorithm for timed automata with bounded subtraction, a class of UTA widely used for modelling scheduling problems. We have implemented our procedure in the tool TChecker and conducted experiments that validate the benefits of our approach.

cs.LO

Wreath/cascade products and related decomposition results for the concurrent setting of Mazurkiewicz traces (extended version)

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 Kamp's 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.

cs.FL