Completeness and the Finite Model Property for Kleene Algebra, Reconsidered

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 2023
Host editors
  • R. Glück
  • L. Santocanale
  • M. Winter
Book title Relational and Algebraic Methods in Computer Science (RAMiCS) 2023
Book subtitle 20th International Conference, RAMiCS 2023, Augsburg, Germany, April 3–6, 2023 : proceedings
ISBN
  • 9783031280825
ISBN (electronic)
  • 9783031280832
Series Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Event Relational and Algebraic Methods in Computer Science
Pages (from-to) 158-175
Publisher Cham: Springer
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
Abstract
Kleene Algebra (KA) is the algebra of regular expressions. Central to the study of KA is Kozen’s (1994) completeness result, which says that any equivalence valid in the language model of KA follows from the axioms of KA. Also of interest is the finite model property (FMP), which says that false equivalences always have a finite counterexample. Palka (2005) showed that, for KA, the FMP is equivalent to completeness.

We provide a unified and elementary proof of both properties. In contrast with earlier completeness proofs, this proof does not rely on minimality or bisimilarity techniques for deterministic automata. Instead, our approach avoids deterministic automata altogether, and uses Antimirov’s derivatives and the well-known transition monoid construction.

Our results are fully verified in the Coq proof assistant.

Document type Conference contribution
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2212.10931 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28083-2_10
Downloads
978-3-031-28083-2_10 (Final published version)
Permalink to this page
Back