On the determinization of event-clock input-driven pushdown automata

Abstract: Input-driven pushdown automata (also known as visibly pushdown automata and as nested word automata) are a subclass of deterministic pushdown automata and a superclass of the parenthesis languages. Nguyen and Ogawa ("Event-clock visibly pushdown automata", SOFSEM 2009) defined a timed extension of these automata under the event-clock model, and showed that this model can be determinized using the method of region construction. This paper defines a further extension of this model with the event clock on the call-return operations, and proposes a new, direct determinization procedure for these automata: an $n$-state nondeterministic automaton with $k$ different clock constraints is transformed to a deterministic automaton with $2^{n^2}$ states, $2^{n^2+k}$ stack symbols and the same clock constraints as in the original automaton. The construction is shown to be asymptotically optimal with respect to both the number of states and the number of stack symbols.