Reachability in two-parametric timed automata with one parameter is EXPSPACE-complete

TL;DR

This paper proves that the reachability problem for two-parametric timed automata with one parameter is EXPSPACE-complete, providing both lower and upper bounds, and introduces techniques that could advance understanding of more complex parametric timed automata.

Contribution

The paper establishes the exact complexity of reachability in this class of automata and introduces new reduction techniques and complexity-theoretic methods.

Findings

Reachability is EXPSPACE-complete for two-parametric timed automata with one parameter.

A novel exponential time reduction to parametric one-counter automata is provided.

Techniques for bounding parameter values are developed, aiding future decidability results.

Abstract

Parametric timed automata (PTA) are an extension of timed automata in which clocks can be compared against parameters. The reachability problem asks for the existence of an assignment of the parameters to the non-negative integers such that reachability holds in the underlying timed automaton. The reachability problem for PTA is long known to be undecidable, already over three parametric clocks. A few years ago, Bundala and Ouaknine proved that for PTA over two parametric clocks and one parameter the reachability problem is decidable and also showed a lower bound for the complexity class PSPACE^NEXP. Our main result is that the reachability problem for two-parametric timed automata with one parameter is EXPSPACE-complete. Our contribution is two-fold. For the EXPSPACE lower bound we make use of deep results from complexity theory, namely a serializability characterization of EXPSPACE (based on Barrington's Theorem) and a logspace translation of numbers in chinese remainder representation to binary representation. For the EXPSPACE upper bound, we give a careful exponential time reduction from PTA over two parametric clocks and one parameter to a slight subclass of parametric one-counter automata (POCA) over one parameter based on a minor adjustment of a construction due to Bundala and Ouaknine. We provide a series of techniques to partition a fictitious run of a POCA into several carefully chosen subruns that allow us to prove that it is sufficient to consider a parameter value of exponential magnitude only. This allows us to show a doubly-exponential upper bound on the value of the only parameter of a PTA over two parametric clocks and one parameter. We hope that extensions of our techniques lead to finally establishing decidability of the long-standing open problem of reachability in parametric timed automata with two parametric clocks (and arbitrarily many parameters).