Directing Words of Fuzzy Finite Automata

TL;DR

This paper extends the concept of directing words from deterministic and nondeterministic finite automata to fuzzy finite automata, introducing new types of directing words and analyzing their properties, decidability, and structural relationships.

Contribution

It adapts existing directing word notions to fuzzy automata, introduces three new types of directing words based on fuzzy transition degrees, and studies their properties and relationships.

Findings

The languages of DDi-directing words are regular.

Decidability of DDi-directability is established.

Complete meet-semilattice of DDi-directable FFAs is characterized.

Abstract

A deterministic finite automaton is directable if it has a directing word which takes the automaton from every state to the same state. These notions have been extended also to other kinds of automata. Thus, B.~Imreh and M.~Steinby (1999) identified three natural types of directing words, called D1-, D2- and D3-directing words, for nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs). Here we adapt these notions for fuzzy finite automata (FFAs). The D3-directing words obtained this way are precisely the directing words introduced by V.~Karthikeyan and M. Rajasekar (2015). With any FFA F we associate an NFA Fnd which has the same Di-directing words as F. Thus, if these definitions are used, the theory of directable FFAs reduces to that of NFAs. We also introduce three new kinds of directing words of fuzzy automata that we call DD1-, DD2- and DD3-directing words, respectively which depend more on the fuzzy transition degrees between states. We establish some basic properties of the sets $DDi(F)$ of DDi-directing words of any given FFA F. In particular, it is shown that these languages are regular, and that DDi-directability is decidable. For so-called normal FFAs the languages DDi(F) are shown to have some special properties. Several relationships between the families of the corresponding sets DDi(F) of DDi-directing words are presented. We also determine the complete meet-semilattice of the various classes of DDi-directable FFAs and normal FFAs and their intersections.