Automata and processes on multisets of communicating objects

Linmin Yang, Yong Wang, Zhe Dang
2010 Natural Computing  
Inspired by P systems initiated by Gheorghe Pãun, we study a computation model over a multiset of communicating objects. The objects in our model are instances of finite automata. They interact with each other by firing external transitions between two objects. Our model, called a service automaton, is intended to specify, at a high level, a service provided on top of network devices abstracted as communicating objects. We formalize the concept of processes, running over a multiset of objects,
more » ... f a service automaton and study the computing power of both single-process and multiprocess service automata. In particular, in the multiprocess case, regular maximal parallelism is defined for inter-process synchronization. It turns out that single-process service automata are equivalent to vector addition systems and hence can define nonregular processes. Among other results, we also show that Presburger reachability problem for single-process service automata is decidable, while it becomes undecidable in the multiprocess case. Hence, multiprocess service automata are strictly more powerful than single-process service automata.
doi:10.1007/s11047-010-9206-0 fatcat:d5xaqhm2c5a6ljjlpelh3rs3ku