The Tractability Border of Reachability in Simple Vector Addition Systems with States

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Chistikov, Dmitry, Czerwiński, Wojciech, Mazowiecki, Filip, Orlikowski, Łukasz, Sinclair-Banks, Henry, Węgrzycki, Karol
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Chistikov, Dmitry
Czerwiński, Wojciech
Mazowiecki, Filip
Orlikowski, Łukasz
Sinclair-Banks, Henry
Węgrzycki, Karol
author_facet Chistikov, Dmitry
Czerwiński, Wojciech
Mazowiecki, Filip
Orlikowski, Łukasz
Sinclair-Banks, Henry
Węgrzycki, Karol
contents Vector Addition Systems with States (VASS), equivalent to Petri nets, are a well-established model of concurrency. The central algorithmic challenge in VASS is the reachability problem: is there a run from a given starting state and counter values to a given target state and counter values? When the input is encoded in binary, reachability is computationally intractable: even in dimension one, it is NP-hard. In this paper, we comprehensively characterise the tractability border of the problem when the input is encoded in unary. For our main result, we prove that reachability is NP-hard in unary encoded 3-VASS, even when structure is heavily restricted to be a simple linear path scheme. This improves upon a recent result of Czerwiński and Orlikowski (2022), in both the number of counters and expressiveness of the considered model, as well as answers open questions of Englert, Lazić, and Totzke (2016) and Leroux (2021). The underlying graph structure of a simple linear path scheme (SLPS) is just a path with self-loops at each node. We also study the exceedingly weak model of computation that is SPLS with counter updates in {-1,0,+1}. Here, we show that reachability is NP-hard when the dimension is bounded by O(α(k)), where αis the inverse Ackermann function and k bounds the size of the SLPS. We complement our result by presenting a polynomial-time algorithm that decides reachability in 2-SLPS when the initial and target configurations are specified in binary. To achieve this, we show that reachability in such instances is well-structured: all loops, except perhaps for a constant number, are taken either polynomially many times or almost maximally. This extends the main result of Englert, Lazić, and Totzke (2016) who showed the problem is in NL when the initial and target configurations are specified in unary.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_16612
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Tractability Border of Reachability in Simple Vector Addition Systems with States
Chistikov, Dmitry
Czerwiński, Wojciech
Mazowiecki, Filip
Orlikowski, Łukasz
Sinclair-Banks, Henry
Węgrzycki, Karol
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Logic in Computer Science
Vector Addition Systems with States (VASS), equivalent to Petri nets, are a well-established model of concurrency. The central algorithmic challenge in VASS is the reachability problem: is there a run from a given starting state and counter values to a given target state and counter values? When the input is encoded in binary, reachability is computationally intractable: even in dimension one, it is NP-hard. In this paper, we comprehensively characterise the tractability border of the problem when the input is encoded in unary. For our main result, we prove that reachability is NP-hard in unary encoded 3-VASS, even when structure is heavily restricted to be a simple linear path scheme. This improves upon a recent result of Czerwiński and Orlikowski (2022), in both the number of counters and expressiveness of the considered model, as well as answers open questions of Englert, Lazić, and Totzke (2016) and Leroux (2021). The underlying graph structure of a simple linear path scheme (SLPS) is just a path with self-loops at each node. We also study the exceedingly weak model of computation that is SPLS with counter updates in {-1,0,+1}. Here, we show that reachability is NP-hard when the dimension is bounded by O(α(k)), where αis the inverse Ackermann function and k bounds the size of the SLPS. We complement our result by presenting a polynomial-time algorithm that decides reachability in 2-SLPS when the initial and target configurations are specified in binary. To achieve this, we show that reachability in such instances is well-structured: all loops, except perhaps for a constant number, are taken either polynomially many times or almost maximally. This extends the main result of Englert, Lazić, and Totzke (2016) who showed the problem is in NL when the initial and target configurations are specified in unary.
title The Tractability Border of Reachability in Simple Vector Addition Systems with States
topic Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16612