Cette thèse développe des techniques à base d'automates pour la vérification formelle de systèmes physiquement distribués communiquant via des canaux fiables de tailles non bornées. Chaque machine peut exécuter localement plusieurs programmes récursifs (multi-threading). Un programme récursif peut également utiliser pour ses calculs locaux des structures de données non bornées, comme des files ou des piles. Ces systèmes, utilisés en pratique, sont si puissants que tous leurs problèmes de vérification deviennent indécidables. Nous introduisons et étudions un nouveau paramètre, appelé largeur de coupe (split-width), pour l'analyse de ces systèmes. Cette largeur de coupe est définie comme le nombre minimum de scissions nécessaires pour partitioner le graphe d'une exécution en parties sur lesquelles on pourra raisonner de manière indépendante. L'analyse est ainsi réalisée avec une approche diviser pour régner. Lorsqu'on se restreint à la classe des comportements ayant une largeur de coupe bornée par une constante, on obtient des procédures de décision optimales pour divers problèmes de vérification sur ces systèmes tels que l'accessibilité, l'inclusion, etc. ainsi que pour la satisfaisabilité et le model checking par rapport à divers formalismes comme la logique monadique du second ordre, la logique dynamique propositionnelle et des logiques temporelles. On montre aussi que les comportements d'un système ont une largeur de coupe bornée si et seulement si ils ont une largeur de clique bornée. Ainsi, grâce aux résultats de Courcelle sur les graphes de degré uniformément borné, la largeur de coupe est non seulement suffisante, mais aussi nécessaire pour obtenir la décidabilité du problème de satisfaisabilité d'une formule de la logique monadique du second ordre. Nous étudions ensuite l'existence de contrôleurs distribués génériques pour nos systèmes distribués. Nous proposons plusieurs contrôleurs, certains ayant un nombre fini d'états et d'autres étant déterministes, qui assurent que les comportements du système sont des graphes ayant une largeur de coupe bornée. Un système ainsi contrôlé de manière distribuée hérite des procédures de décision optimales pour les différents problèmes de vérification lorsque la largeur de coupe est bornée. Cette classe décidable de système généralise plusieurs sous-classes décidables étudiées précédemment. / This thesis investigates automata-theoretic techniques for the verification of physically distributed machines communicating via unbounded reliable channels. Each of these machines may run several recursive programs (multi-threading). A recursive program may also use several unbounded stack and queue data-structures for its local-computation needs. Such real-world systems are so powerful that all verification problems become undecidable. We introduce and study a new parameter called split-width for the under-approximate analysis of such systems. Split-width is the minimum number of splits required in the behaviour graphs to obtain disjoint parts which can be reasoned about independently. Thus it provides a divide-and-conquer approach for their analysis. With the parameter split-width, we obtain optimal decision procedures for various verification problems on these systems like reachability, inclusion, etc. and also for satisfiability and model checking against various logical formalisms such as monadic second-order logic, propositional dynamic logic and temporal logics. It is shown that behaviours of a system have bounded split-width if and only if they have bounded clique-width. Thus, by Courcelle's results on uniformly bounded-degree graphs, split-width is not only sufficient but also necessary to get decidability for MSO satisfiability checking. We then study the feasibility of distributed controllers for our generic distributed systems. We propose several controllers, some finite state and some deterministic, which ensure that the behaviours of the system have bounded split-width. Such a distributedly controlled system yields decidability for the various verification problems by inheriting the optimal decision procedures for split-width. These also extend or complement many known decidable subclasses of systems studied previously.

The constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) over a structure A with a finite relational signature, denoted by CSP(A), is the problem of deciding whether a given finite structure B with the same signature as A has a homomorphism to A. Using concepts and techniques from universal algebra, Bulatov and Zhuk proved independently that if A is finite, then the CSP over A is always in P or NP-complete. Following this result, it is a natural question to ask when and how this dichotomy can be generalized for infinite structures. The infinite-domain CSP dichotomy conjecture (originally formulated by Bodirsky and Pinsker [BPP14]) states that the same complexity dichotomy holds for first-order reducts of finitely bounded homogeneous structures. This conjecture has been solved for many special classes of structures. In this thesis we are developing new techniques involving canonical polymorphisms to attack this conjecture. Using these techniques we prove a new CSP dichotomy result, namely we show that the CSP over every finitely related ω-categorical monadically stable structure is in P or NP-complete.

No description available.

In its many guises and variations, propositional dynamic logic (PDL) plays an important role in various areas of computer science such as databases, artificial intelligence, and computer linguistics. One relevant and powerful variation is ICPDL, the extension of PDL with intersection and converse. Although ICPDL has several interesting applications, its computational properties have never been investigated. In this paper, we prove that ICPDL is decidable by developing a translation to the monadic second order logic of infinite trees. Our result has applications in information logic, description logic, and epistemic logic. In particular, we solve a long-standing open problem in information logic. Another virtue of our approach is that it provides a decidability proof that is more transparent than existing ones for PDL with intersection (but without converse).

Dans la première partie de ce manuscrit nous étudions les fonctions rationnelles, c'est-à-dire définies par des transducteurs unidirectionnels. Notre objectif est d'étendre aux transductions les nombreuses correspondances logique-algèbre qui ont été établies concernant les langages, notamment le célèbre théorème de Schützenberger-McNaughton-Papert. Dans le cadre des fonctions rationnelles sur les mots finis, nous obtenons une caractérisation à la Myhill-Nerode en termes de congruences d'indice fini. Cette caractérisation nous permet d'obtenir un résultat de transfert, à partir d'équivalences logique-algèbre pour les langages vers des équivalences pour les transductions. En particulier nous montrons comment décider si une fonction rationnelle est définissable en logique du premier ordre. Sur les mots infinis, nous pouvons également décider la définissabilité en logique du premier ordre, mais avec des résultats moins généraux.Dans la seconde partie nous introduisons une logique pour les transductions et nous résolvons le problème de synthèse régulière : étant donnée une formule de la logique, peut-on obtenir un transducteur bidirectionnel déterministe satisfaisant la formule ? Les fonctions réalisées par des transducteurs bidirectionnels déterministes sont caractérisés par plusieurs modèles différents, y compris par les transducteurs MSO, et ont ainsi été nommées transductions régulières. Plus précisément nous fournissons un algorithme qui produit toujours une fonction régulière satisfaisant une spécification donnée en entrée.Nous exposons également un lien intéressant entre les transductions et les mots avec données. Par conséquent nous obtenons une logique expressive pour les mots avec données, pour laquelle le problème de satisfiabilité est décidable. / In the first part of this manuscript we focus on the study of rational functions, functions defined by one-way transducers.Our goal is to extend to transductions the many logic-algebra correspondences that have been established for languages, such as the celebrated Schützenberger-McNaughton-Papert Theorem. In the case of rational functions over finite words, we obtain a Myhill-Nerode-like characterization in terms of congruences of finite index. This characterization allows us to obtain a transfer result from logic-algebra equivalences for languages to logic-algebra equivalences for transductions. In particular, we show that one can decide if a rational function can be defined in first-order logic.Over infinite words, we obtain weaker results but are still able to decide first-order definability.In the second part we introduce a logic for transductions and solve the regular synthesis problem: given a formula in the logic, can we obtain a two-way deterministic transducer satisfying the formula?More precisely, we give an algorithm that always produces a regular function satisfying a given specification.We also exhibit an interesting link between transductions and words with ordered data. Thus we obtain as a side result an expressive logic for data words with decidable satisfiability.

Combinatorial problems are ubiquitous in our society and solving such problems efficiently is often crucial. One technique for solving combinatorial problems is constraint-based local search. Its compositional nature together with its efficiency on large problem instances have made this technique particularly attractive. In this thesis we contribute to simplifying the solving of combinatorial problems using constraint-based local search. To provide higher-level modelling options, we introduce set variables and set constraints in local search by extending relevant local search concepts. We also propose a general scheme to follow in order to define what we call natural and balanced constraint measures, and accordingly define such measures for over a dozen set constraints. However, defining such measures for a new constraint is time-consuming and error-prone. To relieve the user from this, we provide generic measures for any set constraint modelled in monadic existential second-order logic. We also theoretically relate these measures to our proposed general scheme, and discuss implementation issues such as incremental algorithms and their worst-case complexities. To enable higher-level search algorithms, we introduce constraint-directed neighbourhoods in local search by proposing new constraint primitives for representing such neighbourhoods. Based on a constraint, possibly modelled in monadic existential second-order logic, these primitives return neighbourhoods with moves that are known in advance to achieve a decrease (or preservation, or increase) of the constraint measures, without the need to iterate over any other moves. We also present a framework for constraint-based local search where one can model and solve combinatorial problems with set variables and set constraints, use any set constraint modelled in monadic existential second-order logic, as well as use constraint-directed neighbourhoods. Experimental results on three real-life problems show the usefulness in practice of our theoretical results: our running times are comparable to the current state-of-the-art approaches to solving the considered problems.

Recently, multi-priced timed automata have received much attention for real-time systems. These automata extend priced timed automata by featuring several price parameters. This permits to compute objectives like the optimal ratio between rewards and costs. Arising from the model of timed automata, the multi-weighted setting has also attracted much notice for classical nondeterministic automata. The present thesis develops multi-weighted MSO-logics on finite, infinite and timed words which are expressively equivalent to multi-weighted automata, and studies decision problems for them. In addition, a Nivat-like theorem for weighted timed automata is proved; this theorem establishes a connection between quantitative and qualitative behaviors of timed automata. Moreover, a logical characterization of timed pushdown automata is given.

This thesis investigates automata-theoretic techniques for the verification of physically distributed machines communicating via unbounded reliable channels. Each of these machines may run several recursive programs (multi-threading). A recursive program may also use several unbounded stack and queue data-structures for its local-computation needs. Such real-world systems are so powerful that all verification problems become undecidable. We introduce and study a new parameter called split-width for the under-approximate analysis of such systems. Split-width is the minimum number of splits required in the behaviour graphs to obtain disjoint parts which can be reasoned about independently. Thus it provides a divide-and-conquer approach for their analysis. With the parameter split-width, we obtain optimal decision procedures for various verification problems on these systems like reachability, inclusion, etc. and also for satisfiability and model checking against various logical formalisms such as monadic second-order logic, propositional dynamic logic and temporal logics. It is shown that behaviours of a system have bounded split-width if and only if they have bounded clique-width. Thus, by Courcelle's results on uniformly bounded-degree graphs, split-width is not only sufficient but also necessary to get decidability for MSO satisfiability checking. We then study the feasibility of distributed controllers for our generic distributed systems. We propose several controllers, some finite state and some deterministic, which ensure that the behaviours of the system have bounded split-width. Such a distributedly controlled system yields decidability for the various verification problems by inheriting the optimal decision procedures for split-width. These also extend or complement many known decidable subclasses of systems studied previously.

Over the last four decades, relational database systems, with their mathematical basis in first-order logic, have provided a congenial and efficient environment to handle enterprise data during its entire life cycle of generation, storage, maintenance and processing. An organic reason for their pervasive popularity is intrinsic support for declarative user queries, wherein the user only specifies the end objectives, and the system takes on the responsibility of identifying the most efficient means, called “plans”, to achieve these objectives. A crucial input to generating efficient query execution plans are the compile-time estimates of the data volumes that are output by the operators implementing the algebraic predicates present in the query. These volume estimates are typically computed using the “selectivities” of the predicates. Unfortunately, a pervasive problem encountered in practice is that these selectivities often differ significantly from the values actually encountered during query execution, leading to poor plan choices and grossly inflated response times. While the database research community has spent considerable efforts to address the above challenge, the prior techniques all suffer from a systemic limitation - the inability to provide any guarantees on the execution performance. In this thesis, we materially address this long-standing open problem by developing a radically different query processing strategy that lends itself to attractive guarantees on run-time performance. Specifically, in our approach, the compile-time estimation process is completely eschewed for error-prone selectivities. Instead, from the set of optimal plans in the query’s selectivity error space, a limited subset called the “plan bouquet”, is selected such that at least one of the bouquet plans is 2-optimal at each location in the space. Then, at run time, an exploratory sequence of cost-budgeted executions from the plan bouquet is carried out, eventually finding a plan that executes to completion within its assigned budget. The duration and switching of these executions is controlled by a graded progression of isosurfaces projected onto the optimal performance profile. We prove that this construction provides viable guarantees on the worst-case performance relative to an oracular system that magically possesses accurate apriori knowledge of all selectivities. Moreover, it ensures repeatable execution strategies across different invocations of a query, an extremely desirable feature in industrial settings. Our second contribution is a suite of techniques that substantively improve on the performance guarantees offered by the basic bouquet algorithm. First, we present an algorithm that skips carefully chosen executions from the basic plan bouquet sequence, leveraging the observation that an expensive execution may provide better coverage as compared to a series of cheaper siblings, thereby reducing the aggregate exploratory overheads. Next, we explore randomized variants with regard to both the sequence of plan executions and the constitution of the plan bouquet, and show that the resulting guarantees are markedly superior, in expectation, to the corresponding worst case values. From a deployment perspective, the above techniques are appealing since they are completely “black-box”, that is, non-invasive with regard to the database engine, implementable using only API features that are commonly available in modern systems. As a proof of concept, the bouquet approach has been fully prototyped in QUEST, a Java-based tool that provides a visual and interactive demonstration of the bouquet identification and execution phases. In similar spirit, we propose an efficient isosurface identification algorithm that avoids exploration of large portions of the error space and drastically reduces the effort involved in bouquet construction. The plan bouquet approach is ideally suited for “canned” query environments, where the computational investment in bouquet identification is amortized over multiple query invocations. The final contribution of this thesis is extending the advantage of compile-time sub-optimality guarantees to ad hoc query environments where the overheads of the off-line bouquet identification may turn out to be impractical. Specifically, we propose a completely revamped bouquet algorithm that constructs the cost-budgeted execution sequence in an “on-the-fly” manner. This is achieved through a “white-box” interaction style with the engine, whereby the plan output cardinalities exposed by the engine are used to compute lower bounds on the error-prone selectivities during plan executions. For this algorithm, the sub-optimality guarantees are in the form of a low order polynomial of the number of error-prone selectivities in the query. The plan bouquet approach has been empirically evaluated on both PostgreSQL and a commercial engine ComOpt, over the TPC-H and TPC-DS benchmark environments. Our experimental results indicate that it delivers orders of magnitude improvements in the worst-case behavior, without impairing the average-case performance, as compared to the native optimizers of these systems. In absolute terms, the worst case sub-optimality is upper bounded by 20 across the suite of queries, and the average performance is empirically found to be within a factor of 4 wrt the optimal. Even with the on-the-fly bouquet algorithm, the guarantees are found to be within a factor of 3 as compared to those achievable in the corresponding canned query environment. Overall, the plan bouquet approach provides novel performance guarantees that open up exciting possibilities for robust query processing.

Tous les problèmes définissables en logique du second ordre monadique peuvent être résolus en temps polynomial dans les classes de graphes qui ont une largeur de clique bornée. La largeur de clique est un paramètre de graphe défini de manière algébrique, c'est-à-dire, à partir d'opérations de composition de graphes. La largeur de rang, définie de manière combinatoire, est une notion équivalente à la largeur de clique des graphes non orientés. Nous donnons une caractérisation algébrique de la largeur de rang et nous montrons qu'elle est linéairement bornée par la largeur arborescente. Nous proposons également une notion de largeur de rang pour les graphes orientés et une relation de vertex-minor pour les graphes orientés. Nous montrons que les graphes orientés qui ont une largeur de rang bornée sont caractérisés par une liste finie de graphes orientés à exclure comme vertex-minor. Beaucoup de classes de graphes n'ont pas une largeur de rang bornée, par exemple, les graphes planaires. Nous nous intéressons aux systèmes d'étiquetage dans ces classes de graphes. Un système d'étiquetage pour une propriété P dans un graphe G, consiste à assigner une étiquette, aussi petite que possible, à chaque sommet de telle sorte que l'on puisse vérifier si G satisfait P en n'utilisant que les étiquettes des sommets. Nous montrons que si P est une propriété définissable en logique du premier ordre alors, certaines classes de graphes de largeur de clique localement bornée admettent un système d'étiquetage pour P avec des étiquettes de taille logarithmique. Parmi ces classes on peut citer les classes de graphes de degré borné, les graphes planaires et plus généralement les classes de graphes qui excluent un apex comme mineur et, les graphes d'intervalle unitaire. Si x et y sont deux sommets, X un ensemble de sommets et F un ensemble d'arêtes, nous notons Conn(x,y,X,F) la propriété qui vérifie dans un graphe donné si x et y sont connectés par un chemin, qui ne passe par aucun sommet de X si aucune arête de F. Cette propriété n'est pas définissable en logique du premier ordre. Nous montrons qu'elle admet un système d'étiquetage avec des étiquettes de taille logarithmique dans les graphes planaires. Nous montrons enfin que Conn(x,y,X,0) admet également un système d'étiquetage avec des étiquettes de taille logarithmique dans des classes de graphes qui sont définies comme des combinaisons de graphes qui ont une petite largeur de clique et telles que le graphe d'intersection de ces derniers est planaire et est de degré borné. / Every property definable in onadic second order logic can be checked in polynomial-time on graph classes of bounded clique-width. Clique-width is a graph parameter defined in an algebraical way, i.e., with operations ``concatenating graphs'' and that generalize concatenation of words.Rank-width, defined in a combinatorial way, is equivalent to the clique-width of undirected graphs. We give an algebraic characterization of rank-width and we show that rank-width is linearly bounded in term of tree-width. We also propose a notion of ``rank-width'' of directed graphs and a vertex-minor inclusion for directed graphs. We show that directed graphs of bounded ``rank-width'' are characterized by a finite list of finite directed graphs to exclude as vertex-minor. Many graph classes do not have bounded rank-width, e.g., planar graphs. We are interested in labeling schemes on these graph classes. A labeling scheme for a property P in a graph G consists in assigning a label, as short as possible, to each vertex of G and such that we can verify if G satisfies P by just looking at the labels. We show that every property definable in first order logic admit labeling schemes with labels of logarithmic size on certain graph classes that have bounded local clique-width. Bounded degree graph classes, minor closed classes of graphs that exclude an apex graph as a minor have bounded local clique-width. If x and y are two vertices and X is a subset of the set of vertices and Y is a subset of the set of edges, we let Conn(x,y,X,Y) be the graph property x and y are connected by a path that avoids the vertices in X and the edges in Y. This property is not definable by a first order formula. We show that it admits a labeling scheme with labels of logarithmic size on planar graphs. We also show that Conn(x,y,X,0) admits short labeling schemes with labels of logarithmic size on graph classes that are ``planar gluings'' of graphs of small clique-width and with limited overlaps.