Detecting useless transitions in pushdown automata

Evangelos Chatzikalymnios, Wan Fokkink*, Dick Grune, Brinio Hond, Peter Rutgers

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to JournalArticleAcademicpeer-review

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Abstract

Pushdown automata may contain transitions that are never used in any accepting run of the automaton. We present an algorithm for detecting such useless transitions. A finite automaton that captures the possible stack content during runs of the pushdown automaton, is first constructed in a forward procedure to determine which transitions are reachable, and then employed in a backward procedure to determine which of these transitions can lead to a final state. An implementation of the algorithm is shown to exhibit a favorable performance.

Original languageEnglish
Article number104612
Pages (from-to)1-12
Number of pages12
JournalInformation and Computation
Volume279
Early online date7 Aug 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Javier Esparza proposed the alternative approach using pre? and post?. J?rg Endrullis provided a useful suggestion for the efficient implementation of this alternative approach.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Inc.

Copyright:
Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

Funding

Javier Esparza proposed the alternative approach using pre? and post?. J?rg Endrullis provided a useful suggestion for the efficient implementation of this alternative approach.

Keywords

  • Finite automaton
  • Pushdown automaton
  • Useless transition

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