2 and Pierluigi San Pietro.pdf

Dense Counter Machines and Verification Problems Gaoyan Xie 1 , Zhe Dang 1 , Oscar H. Ibarra 2 and Pierluigi San Pietro 31 School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Washington State University Pullman, WA 99164, USA2 Department of Computer Science University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA3 Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione Politecnico di Milano, Italia Abstract. We generalize the traditional definition of a multicounter machine (where the counters, which can only assume nonnegative integer values, can be incremented/decremented by 1 and tested for zero) by allowing the machine the additional ability to increment/decrement the counters by a non- deterministically chosen fractional amount ? between 0 and 1 (the ? may be different at each step). We show that, under some restrictions on counter behavior, the binary reachability set of such a machine is definable in the additive theory of the reals and integers. There are applications of this result in ver- ification, and we give one example in the paper. We also extend the notion of “semilinear language” to “dense semilinear language” and show its connection to a restricted class of dense multicounter automata. Keywords: infinite-state system, reachability, dense counters, additive theory of reals and integers Category: A. Regular papers Contact author: Zhe Dang Email: zdang@eecs.wsu.edu Tel: 509-335-7238. Fax: 509-335-3818. 21 Introduction In traditional automata theory, unbounded discrete data structures (e.g., integer counters, stacks, queues, etc.) are well-studied. Almost every area in computer science, including verification, has benefited from the fundamental results obtained by automata theorists. Still, practitioners in formal specification/verification keep challenging automata theorists with new models emerging in verification applications. Some of the models, however, have not been well-studied in traditional automata theory. A typical example concerns the theory and fundamen