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Reducing memory requirements in reachability‐based finite automata operations
Author(s) -
Watson Bruce W.
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
software: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.437
H-Index - 70
eISSN - 1097-024X
pISSN - 0038-0644
DOI - 10.1002/spe.561
Subject(s) - reachability , computer science , automaton , finite state machine , asynchronous communication , reachability problem , timed automaton , theoretical computer science , dfa minimization , algorithm , quantum finite automata , automata theory , computer network
New applications of finite automata, such as computational linguistics and asynchronous circuit simulation, can require automata of millions or even billions of states. All known construction methods (in particular, the most effective reachability‐based ones that save memory, such as the subset construction, and simultaneously minimizing constructions, such as Brzozowski's) have intermediate memory usage much larger than the final automaton, thereby restricting the maximum size of the automata which can be built. In this paper, I present a reachability‐based optimization which can be used in most of these construction algorithms to reduce the intermediate memory requirements. The optimization is presented in conjunction with an easily understood (and implemented) canonical automaton construction algorithm. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.