Checking NFA equivalence with bisimulations up to congruence

  • Authors:
  • Filippo Bonchi;Damien Pous

  • Affiliations:
  • CNRS, Lyon, France;CNRS, Lyon, France

  • Venue:
  • POPL '13 Proceedings of the 40th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

We introduce bisimulation up to congruence as a technique for proving language equivalence of non-deterministic finite automata. Exploiting this technique, we devise an optimisation of the classical algorithm by Hopcroft and Karp. We compare our approach to the recently introduced antichain algorithms, by analysing and relating the two underlying coinductive proof methods. We give concrete examples where we exponentially improve over antichains; experimental results moreover show non negligible improvements.