Issue |
RAIRO-Theor. Inf. Appl.
Volume 35, Number 4, July/August 2001
|
|
---|---|---|
Page(s) | 311 - 330 | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/ita:2001122 | |
Published online | 15 April 2002 |
Automata-based Representations for Infinite Graphs
1
Dipartimento di Informatica ed Applicazioni,
Università degli Studi di Salerno, Baronissi, Italia; (sallat@dia.unisa.it)
2
Dipartimento di Informatica ed Applicazioni,
Università degli Studi di Salerno, Baronissi, Italia; (napoli@dia.unisa.it)
Received:
July
1999
Accepted:
August
2001
New compact representations of infinite graphs are investigated. Finite automata are used to represent labelled hyper-graphs which can be also multi-graphs. Our approach consists of a general framework where vertices are represented by a regular prefix-free language and edges are represented by a regular language and a function over tuples. We consider three different functions over tuples: given a tuple the first function returns its first difference, the second one returns its suffix and the last one returns its infixes. The first-difference function is substantially a direct generalization to infinite multi-hyper-graphs of the representation introduced by Ehrenfeucht et al. for finite graphs. This representation, though very interesting for finite graphs, turns out to be quite unsatisfactory for infinite graphs. The other two functions we consider while preserving some interesting features of their representation also achieves a high expressive power. As a matter of fact, our formalism either with the suffix or infix function results to be more powerful than the equational graphs introduced by Courcelle and the simple graphs defined by Caucal. The monadic second order theories of these two classes of graphs are undecidable, but still many interesting graph properties are decidable. The use of a regular prefix-free language to represent the vertices allows (fixed the language of the edges) to express a graph by a labelled tree, moreover, the use of finite automata to represent the edges allows the verification of graph properties.
Mathematics Subject Classification: 05C62
Key words: Infinite Graphs / Formal Languages.
© EDP Sciences, 2001
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.