Simplifying Nondeterministic Finite Cover Automata

Cezar Câmpeanu
(The University of Prince Edward Island)

The concept of Deterministic Finite Cover Automata (DFCA) was introduced at WIA '98, as a more compact representation than Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA) for finite languages. In some cases representing a finite language, Nondeterministic Finite Automata (NFA) may significantly reduce the number of states used. The combined power of the succinctness of the representation of finite languages using both cover languages and non-determinism has been suggested, but never systematically studied. In the present paper, for nondeterministic finite cover automata (NFCA) and l-nondeterministic finite cover automaton (l-NFCA), we show that minimization can be as hard as minimizing NFAs for regular languages, even in the case of NFCAs using unary alphabets. Moreover, we show how we can adapt the methods used to reduce, or minimize the size of NFAs/DFCAs/l-DFCAs, for simplifying NFCAs/l-NFCAs.

In Zoltán Ésik and Zoltán Fülöp: Proceedings 14th International Conference on Automata and Formal Languages (AFL 2014), Szeged, Hungary, May 27-29, 2014, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 151, pp. 162–173.
Published: 21st May 2014.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.151.11 bibtex PDF
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