Parity games played on transition graphs of one-counter processes

  • Authors:
  • Olivier Serre

  • Affiliations:
  • LIAFA

  • Venue:
  • FOSSACS'06 Proceedings of the 9th European joint conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We consider parity games played on special pushdown graphs, namely those generated by one-counter processes. For parity games on pushdown graphs, it is known from [23] that deciding the winner is an ExpTime-complete problem. An important corollary of this result is that the μ-calculus model checking problem for pushdown processes is ExpTime-complete. As one-counter processes are special cases of pushdown processes, it follows that deciding the winner in a parity game played on the transition graph of a one-counter process can be achieved in ExpTime. Nevertheless the proof for the ExpTime-hardness lower bound of [23] cannot be adapted to that case. Therefore, a natural question is whether the ExpTime upper bound can be improved in this special case. In this paper, we adapt techniques from [11,4] and provide a PSpace upper bound and a DP-hard lower bound for this problem. We also give two important consequences of this result. First, we improve the best upper bound known for model-checking one-counter processes against μ-calculus. Second, we show how these games can be used to solve pushdown games with winning conditions that are Boolean combinations of a parity condition on the control states with conditions on the stack height.