Annotated Stack Trees

Abstract: Annotated pushdown automata provide an automaton model of higher-order recursion schemes, which may in turn be used to model higher-order programs for the purposes of verification. We study Ground Annotated Stack Tree Rewrite Systems -- a tree rewrite system where each node is labelled by the configuration of an annotated pushdown automaton. This allows the modelling of fork and join constructs in higher-order programs and is a generalisation of higher-order stack trees recently introduced by Penelle. We show that, given a regular set of annotated stack trees, the set of trees that can reach this set is also regular, and constructible in n-EXPTIME for an order-n system, which is optimal. We also show that our construction can be extended to allow a global state through which unrelated nodes of the tree may communicate, provided the number of communications is subject to a fixed bound.