Register Set Automata (Technical Report)

Abstract: We present register set automata (RsAs), a register automaton model over data words where registers can contain sets of data values and the following operations are supported: adding values to registers, clearing registers, and testing (non-)membership. We show that the emptiness problem for RsAs is decidable and complete for the $F_\omega$ class. Moreover, we show that a large class of register automata can be transformed into deterministic RsAs, which can serve as a basis for (i) fast matching of a family of regular expressions with back-references and (ii) language inclusion algorithm for a sub-class of register automata. RsAs are incomparable in expressive power to other popular automata models over data words, such as alternating register automata and pebble automata.