Automata and processes on multisets of communicating objects

  • Authors:

  • Linmin Yang;Yong Wang;Zhe Dang

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, Pullman, USA 99164;Google Inc., Mountain View, USA 94043;School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, Pullman, USA 99164

  • Venue:
  • Natural Computing: an international journal
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Inspired by P systems initiated by Gheorghe Pãun, we study a computation model over a multiset of communicating objects. The objects in our model are instances of finite automata. They interact with each other by firing external transitions between two objects. Our model, called a service automaton, is intended to specify, at a high level, a service provided on top of network devices abstracted as communicating objects. We formalize the concept of processes, running over a multiset of objects, of a service automaton and study the computing power of both single-process and multiprocess service automata. In particular, in the multiprocess case, regular maximal parallelism is defined for inter-process synchronization. It turns out that single-process service automata are equivalent to vector addition systems and hence can define nonregular processes. Among other results, we also show that Presburger reachability problem for single-process service automata is decidable, while it becomes undecidable in the multiprocess case. Hence, multiprocess service automata can not be effectively simulated by vector addition systems.