PAWS: A Tool for the Analysis of Weighted Systems

TL;DR

PAWS is a versatile tool that analyzes weighted automata and transition systems using customizable semirings, enabling flexible and automated algebraic analysis for complex systems.

Contribution

It introduces a generic, extensible architecture allowing users to define and generate new semirings dynamically for analyzing weighted automata and transition systems.

Findings

Supports arbitrary user-defined semirings

Enables dynamic generation of semirings during runtime

Provides automation techniques for creating new semiring structures

Abstract

PAWS is a tool to analyse the behaviour of weighted automata and conditional transition systems. At its core PAWS is based on a generic implementation of algorithms for checking language equivalence in weighted automata and bisimulation in conditional transition systems. This architecture allows for the use of arbitrary user-defined semirings. New semirings can be generated during run-time and the user can rely on numerous automatisation techniques to create new semiring structures for PAWS' algorithms. Basic semirings such as distributive complete lattices and fields of fractions can be defined by specifying few parameters, more exotic semirings can be generated from other semirings or defined from scratch using a built-in semiring generator. In the most general case, users can define new semirings by programming (in C#) the base operations of the semiring and a procedure to solve linear equations and use their newly generated semiring in the analysis tools that PAWS offers.