Vector addition system with states is an ubiquitous model of computation with extensive applications in computer science. The reachability problem for vector addition systems is central since many other problems reduce to that question. The problem is decidable and it was recently proved that the dimension of the vector addition system is an important parameter of the complexity. In fixed dimensions larger than two, the complexity is not known (with huge complexity gaps). In dimension two, the reachability problem was shown to be PSPACE-complete by Blondin et al. in 2015. We consider an extension of this model, called 2-TVASS, where the first counter can be tested for zero. This model naturally extends the classical model of one counter automata (OCA). We show that reachability is still solvable in polynomial space for 2-TVASS. As in the work Blondin et al., our approach relies on the existence of small reachability certificates obtained by concatenating polynomially many cycles.
By adapting the iterative yardstick construction of Stockmeyer, we show that the reachability problem for vector addition systems with a stack does not have elementary complexity. As a corollary, the same lower bound holds for the satisfiability problem for a two-variable first-order logic on trees in which unbounded data may label only leaf nodes. Whether the two problems are decidable remains an open question.
Vector Addition Systems and equivalent Petri nets are a well established models of concurrency. The central algorithmic problem for Vector Addition Systems with a long research history is the reachability problem asking whether there exists a run from one given configuration to another. We settle its complexity to be Ackermann-complete thus closing the problem open for 45 years. In particular we prove that the problem is $\mathcal{F}_k$-hard for Vector Addition Systems with States in dimension $6k$, where $\mathcal{F}_k$ is the $k$-th complexity class from the hierarchy of fast-growing complex…
Determining the complexity of the reachability problem for vector addition systems with states (VASS) is a long-standing open problem in computer science. Long known to be decidable, the problem to this day lacks any complexity upper bound whatsoever. In this paper, reachability for two-dimensional VASS is shown PSPACE-complete. This improves on a previously known doubly exponential time bound established by Howell, Rosier, Huynh and Yen in 1986. The coverability and boundedness problems are also noted to be PSPACE-complete. In addition, some complexity results are given for the reachability p…
We study the geometry of reachability sets of continuous vector addition systems with states (VASS). In particular we establish that they are almost Minkowski sums of convex cones and zonotopes generated by the vectors labelling the transitions of the VASS. We use the latter to prove that short so-called linear path schemes suffice as witnesses of reachability in continuous VASS of fixed dimension. Then, we give new polynomial-time algorithms for the reachability problem for linear path schemes. Finally, we also establish that enriching the model with zero tests makes the reachability problem …
Blondin et al. showed at LICS 2015 that two-dimensional vector addition systems with states have reachability witnesses of length exponential in the number of states and polynomial in the norm of vectors. The resulting guess-and-verify algorithm is optimal (PSPACE), but only if the input vectors are given in binary. We answer positively the main question left open by their work, namely establish that reachability witnesses of pseudo-polynomial length always exist. Hence, when the input vectors are given in unary, the improved guess-and-verify algorithm requires only logarithmic space.
The reachability problem for vector addition systems is a central problem of net theory. This problem is known to be decidable but the complexity is still unknown. Whereas the problem is EXPSPACE-hard, no elementary upper bounds complexity are known. In this paper we consider the reversible reachability problem. This problem consists to decide if two configurations are reachable one from each other, or equivalently if they are in the same strongly connected component of the reachability graph. We show that this problem is EXPSPACE-complete. As an application of the introduced materials we char…
The reachability problem in vector addition systems is a central question, not only for the static verification of these systems, but also for many inter-reducible decision problems occurring in various fields. The currently best known upper bound on this problem is not primitive-recursive, even when considering systems of fixed dimension. We provide significant refinements to the classical decomposition algorithm of Mayr, Kosaraju, and Lambert and to its termination proof, which yield an ACKERMANN upper bound in the general case, and primitive-recursive upper bounds in fixed dimension. While …
We study the complexity of the reachability problem for Vector Addition Systems with States (VASSes) in fixed dimensions. We provide four lower bounds improving the currently known state-of-the-art: 1) \np-hardness for unary flat $4$-VASSes (VASSes in dimension 4), 2) \pspace-hardness for unary $5$-VASSes, 3) \expspace-hardness for binary $6$-VASSes and 4) \tower-hardness for unary $8$-VASSes.
Branching VASS (BVASS) generalise vector addition systems with states by allowing for special branching transitions that can non-deterministically distribute a counter value between two control states. A run of a BVASS consequently becomes a tree, and reachability is to decide whether a given configuration is the root of a reachability tree. This paper shows P-completeness of reachability in BVASS in dimension one, the first decidability result for reachability in a subclass of BVASS known so far. Moreover, we show that coverability and boundedness in BVASS in dimension one are P-complete as w…
This paper is about reachability analysis in a restricted subclass of multi-pushdown automata. We assume that the control states of an automaton are partially ordered, and all transitions of an automaton go downwards with respect to the order. We prove decidability of the reachability problem, and computability of the backward reachability set. As the main contribution, we identify relevant subclasses where the reachability problem becomes NP-complete. This matches the complexity of the same problem for communication-free vector addition systems, a special case of stateless multi-pushdown auto…
The reachability problem for Vector Addition Systems (VASs) is a central problem of net theory. The general problem is known to be decidable by algorithms exclusively based on the classical Kosaraju-Lambert-Mayr-Sacerdote-Tenney decomposition. This decomposition is used in this paper to prove that the Parikh images of languages recognized by VASs are semi-pseudo-linear; a class that extends the semi-linear sets, a.k.a. the sets definable in Presburger arithmetic. We provide an application of this result; we prove that a final configuration is not reachable from an initial one if and only if th…
More than 30 years after their inception, the decidability proofs for reachability in vector addition systems (VAS) still retain much of their mystery. These proofs rely crucially on a decomposition of runs successively refined by Mayr, Kosaraju, and Lambert, which appears rather magical, and for which no complexity upper bound is known. We first offer a justification for this decomposition technique, by showing that it computes the ideal decomposition of the set of runs, using the natural embedding relation between runs as well quasi ordering. In a second part, we apply recent results on the …
In this work, we alleviate the well-known State-Space Explosion (SSE) problem in Component Based Systems (CBS). We consider CBS that can be specified as a system of n Communicating Finite State Machines (CFSMs) interacting by rendezvous/handshake method. In order to avoid the SSE incurred by the traditional product machine composition of the given input CFSMs based on interleaving semantics, we construct a sum machine composition based on state-oriented partial-order semantics. The sum machine consists of a set of n unfolded CFSMs. By storing statically, just a small subset of global state vec…
A complete characterization of the complexity of the reachability problem for vector addition system has been open for a long time. The problem is shown to be Tower complete.
Petri nets, also known as vector addition systems, are a long established model of concurrency with extensive applications in modelling and analysis of hardware, software and database systems, as well as chemical, biological and business processes. The central algorithmic problem for Petri nets is reachability: whether from the given initial configuration there exists a sequence of valid execution steps that reaches the given final configuration. The complexity of the problem has remained unsettled since the 1960s, and it is one of the most prominent open questions in the theory of verificatio…
Counter reachability games are played by two players on a graph with labelled edges. Each move consists in picking an edge from the current location and adding its label to a counter vector. The objective is to reach a given counter value in a given location. We distinguish three semantics for counter reachability games, according to what happens when a counter value would become negative: the edge is either disabled, or enabled but the counter value becomes zero, or enabled. We consider the problem of deciding the winner in counter reachability games and show that, in most cases, it has the s…
This note is a product of digestion of the famous proof of decidability of the reachability problem for vector addition systems with states (VASS), as first established by Mayr in 1981 and then simplified by Kosaraju in 1982. The note is neither intended to be rigorously formal nor complete; it is rather intended to be an intuitive but precise enough description of main concepts exploited in the proof. Very roughly, the overall idea is to provide a decidable condition Theta on a VASS such that Theta implies reachability and its negation implies that the size of VASS can be reduced. With these …
We study a class of reachability problems in weighted graphs with constraints on the accumulated weight of paths. The problems we study can equivalently be formulated in the model of vector addition systems with states (VASS). We consider a version of the vertex-to-vertex reachability problem in which the accumulated weight of a path is required always to be non-negative. This is equivalent to the so-called control-state reachability problem (also called the coverability problem) for 1-dimensional VASS. We show that this problem lies in NC: the class of problems solvable in polylogarithmic par…
We consider the problem of computing reachability probabilities: given a Markov chain, an initial state of the Markov chain, and a set of goal states of the Markov chain, what is the probability of reaching any of the goal states from the initial state? This problem can be reduced to solving a linear equation Ax = b for x, where A is a matrix and b is a vector. We consider two iterative methods to solve the linear equation: the Jacobi method and the biconjugate gradient stabilized (BiCGStab) method. For both methods, a sequential and a parallel version have been implemented. The parallel versi…
Following a recently considered generalization of linear equations to unordered data vectors, we perform a further generalization to ordered data vectors. These generalized equations naturally appear in the analysis of vector addition systems (or Petri nets) extended with ordered data. We show that nonnegative-integer solvability of linear equations is computationally equivalent (up to an exponential blowup) with the reachability problem for (plain) vector addition systems. This high complexity is surprising, and contrasts with NP-completeness for unordered data vectors. Also surprisingly, we …
In this paper we propose augmented interval Markov chains (AIMCs): a generalisation of the familiar interval Markov chains (IMCs) where uncertain transition probabilities are in addition allowed to depend on one another. This new model preserves the flexibility afforded by IMCs for describing stochastic systems where the parameters are unclear, for example due to measurement error, but also allows us to specify transitions with probabilities known to be identical, thereby lending further expressivity. The focus of this paper is reachability in AIMCs. We study the qualitative, exact quantitativ…
We study linear-time temporal logics interpreted over data words with multiple attributes. We restrict the atomic formulas to equalities of attribute values in successive positions and to repetitions of attribute values in the future or past. We demonstrate correspondences between satisfiability problems for logics and reachability-like decision problems for counter systems. We show that allowing/disallowing atomic formulas expressing repetitions of values in the past corresponds to the reachability/coverability problem in Petri nets. This gives us 2EXPSPACE upper bounds for several satisfiabi…
TTT: A Temporal Refinement Heuristic for Tenuously Tractable Discrete Time Reachability Problems
Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning, Intelligent Systems Department, School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science（机器人、感知与学习 division，智能系统部门，电气工程与计算机科学学院）；Digital Futures at KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院数字未来）
