202311031611

Tags : Timed Automata

Alternating Timed Automata


Definition

An Alternating Timed Automaton is a tuple where

  • is a set of states
  • is the starting state
  • is a set of clock
  • is the alphabet
  • is the set of final states.
  • is the set of transitions or

Intuitively, given a state and a transition that can satisfied you return a set of states and resets for each of the states, such that from each of those states, there should be an accepting run. Or it goes to a boolean formula of states that represents both disjunctions and conjunctions of runs.


Accepting runs

Given a transition in an Alternating Timed Automaton

There is an accepting run from if

  • There is an accepting run from each of and after the transition. or
  • There is an accepting run from after the transition, or
  • There is an accepting run from each of , and after the transition.

Acceptance Game

There is a game corresponding to the acceptance of a given word ina timed automata that can be played between players such that if one the players has a winning strategy then the word is accepted.

Construction and Gameplay

Given a timed word we construct a graph such that we construct a tree for a timed automata, and we start at the starting state as the root. Then for each transition to an element of
If if of the from

  • then Player 1 chooses a sub-formula
  • then Player 2 chooses a sub-formula After we reach an atomic formula we pick the corresponding transition in the graph keep repeating this until the word is fully red

Winning Scenarios

We say that Player 2 wins, if the final state that the game ends on is a final state, otherwise Player 1 wins

We say that a word is accepted iff Player 2 has a winning strategy

Example

Running the alternating timed automaton given in the Example section, we can construct the following graph for its runs on the word

Transclude of Alternating-Timed-Automata-Game-Example.excalidraw
Here, Player 1 has a choice to make on the first step, but whatever they do, they eventually reach a final state. Hence Player 2 will always win. Hence the word will be accepted.

The correctness of the game is trivial.


Closure Properties

Alternating Timed Automata are closed under

  • Union and Intersection (use the new transition to directly get a new construction)
  • Complementation (Replace all the accepting and non accepting states, and switch all and in the transition)

This shows that Alternating Timed Automata are strictly more powerful than timed automata as the languages accepted by these are closed under complementation.


Example

Transclude of Timed-Automata-Example.excalidraw


References

Expressability of One-Clock Alternating Timed Automata Alternating Finite Automaton