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On termination and invariance for faulty channel machines

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Formal Aspects of Computing

Abstract

A channel machine consists of a finite controller together with several fifo channels; the controller can read messages from the head of a channel and write messages to the tail of a channel. In this paper we focus on channel machines with insertion errors, i.e., machines in whose channels messages can spontaneously appear. We consider the invariance problem: does a given insertion channel machine have an infinite computation all of whose configurations satisfy a given predicate? We show that this problem is primitive-recursive if the predicate is closed under message losses. We also give a non-elementary lower bound for the invariance problem under this restriction. Finally, using the previous result, we show that the satisfiability problem for the safety fragment of Metric Temporal Logic is non-elementary.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LSV, ENS Cachan, CNRS, Cachan, France

    Patricia Bouyer, Nicolas Markey & Philippe Schnoebelen

  2. Department of Computer Science, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

    Joël Ouaknine & James Worrell

Authors
  1. Patricia Bouyer
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  2. Nicolas Markey
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  3. Joël Ouaknine
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  4. Philippe Schnoebelen
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  5. James Worrell
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to James Worrell.

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Peter Höfner, Robert van Glabbeek and Ian Hayes

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Bouyer, P., Markey, N., Ouaknine, J. et al. On termination and invariance for faulty channel machines. Form Asp Comp 24, 595–607 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-012-0234-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-012-0234-7

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