PARALLEL COMMUNICATING PUSHDOWN AUTOMATA SYSTEMS

Abstract

We consider automata systems consisting of several pushdown automata working in parallel and communicating the contents of their stacks by request, using a communication strategy borrowed from grammar system theory. We investigate the computational power of these mechanisms. We prove that non-centralized parallel communicating pushdown automata systems with a bounded number of components, where each automaton is allowed to issue a query, are able to recognize all recursively enumerable languages. We also present homomorphical characterizations of the class of recursively enumerable languages for the centralized variants, where only a distinguished automaton issues queries. Moreover, we show that these centralized variants are at least as powerful as one-way multihead pushdown automata. Finally, some open problems and further directions of research are discussed.