Parityizing Rabin and Streett

Abstract

The parity acceptance condition for $omega$-regular languages is a special case of the Rabin and Streett acceptance conditions. While the parity acceptance condition is as expressive as the richer conditions, in both the deterministic and nondeterministic settings, Rabin and Streett automata are more succinct, and their translation to parity automata may blow-up the state space. The appealing properties of the parity condition, mainly the fact it is dualizable and allows for memoryless strategies, make such a translation useful in various decision procedures.

In this paper we study languages that are recognizable by an automaton on top of which one can define both a Rabin and a Streett condition for the language. We show that if the underlying automaton is deterministic, then we can define on top of it also a parity condition for the language.  We also show that this relation does not hold in the nondeterministic setting. Finally, we use the construction of the parity condition in the deterministic case in order to solve the problem of deciding whether a given Rabin or Streett automaton has an equivalent parity automaton on the same structure, and show that it is PTIME-complete in the deterministic setting and is PSPACE-complete in the nondeterministic setting.