On the Existence of Lookahead Delegators for NFA

We investigate deterministically simulating (i.e., solving the membership problem for) nondeterministic finite automata (NFA), relying solely on the NFA’s resources (states and transitions). Unlike the standard NFA simulation, involving an algorithm which stores at each step all the states reached nondeterministically while reading the input, we consider deterministic finite automata (DFA) with lookahead, which choose the “right” NFA transitions based on a fixed number of input symbols read ahead. This concept, known as lookahead delegation, arose in a formal study of web services composition and its subsequent practical applications. Here we answer several related questions, such as “when is lookahead delegation possible?” and “how hard is it to find a delegator with a given lookahead buffer size?”. In particular, we show that only finite languages have the property that all their NFA have delegators. This implies, among others, that delegation is a machine proper...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: IJFCS
• Authors: Bala Ravikumar, Nicolae Santean
• Keywords: IJFCS 2007, Lookahead, Standard Nfa Simulation, finite Automata