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Target for pushdown RBN

Reconfigurable Broadcast Networks (RBN) are a model for large groups of identical agents communicating via unreliable broadcast. A pushdown RBN (PRBN) is simply one where each agent is modeled by a pushdown transition system. A PRBN on a message alphabet M\mathcal{M} is described by a pushdown automaton A\mathcal{A} over the alphabet {br(m),rec(m)∣m∈M}\{br(m), rec(m) | m \in \mathcal{M} \}. Configurations of A\mathcal{A}, i.e., pairs (q,σ)(q, \sigma) of state and stack content, are called local configurations. A configuration of the PRBN is a function from a finite set of agents A\mathbb{A} to local configurations. A run starts with an arbitrarily large set of agents, all in the initial state with an empty stack . A step consists of one agent taking a transition with a broadcast br(m)br(m), and each other agent either not moving or taking a transition rec(m)rec(m) (in other words, one agent broadcasts and other agents non-deterministically receive the broadcast or not). Classic problems on such models ask whether a given set of configurations is reachable. A particular case of interest is whether we can reach a configuration where all agents are in a given state qfq_f. This problem is called Target. The open problem is to find tight complexity bounds on the Target problem for PRBN. The problem on finite-state RBN is known to be solvable in polynomial time. An easy reduction from Horn satisfiability shows PTIME- completeness. On the other hand, one can show that the problem for PRBN is in NP: intuitively, to witness Target, it suffices to one can guess the set of messages M′⊆M\mathcal{M}' \subseteq \mathcal{M} of messages used, and two orders on this set, an order of appearance ≤a\leq_a and one of disappearance ≤d\leq_d. Those orders are the one in which messages are first broadcast in the run, and the one in which messages are last broadcast. Then one checks, for each m∈M′m \in \mathcal{M}', that there are local runs that broadcast mm and only receive messages lower for <a<_a beforehand (resp. greater for <d<_d afterwards). If they exist, one can construct a run witnessing Target by making many agents follow each of those runs. If a run witnessing Target exists, they can be obtained by taking the local runs of agents broadcasting first and last each message. Is the Target problem for PRBN NP-hard? in PTIME?

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Boyuan Wang portraitBoyuan Wang
Minghan Wang portraitMinghan Wang
Bochao Li portraitBochao Li
Hongwei Hu portraitHongwei Hu