Analytic methods for reachability problems

Abstract

We consider a function-analytic approach to study synchronizing automata, primitive and ergodic matrix families. This gives a new way to establish some criteria for primitivity and for ergodicity of families of nonnegative matrices. We introduce a concept of canonical partition and use it to construct a polynomial-time algorithm for finding a positive matrix product and an ergodic matrix product whenever they exist. This also provides a generalization of some results of the Perron-Frobenius theory from one nonnegative matrix to families of matrices. Then we define the h-synchronizing automata and prove that the existence of a reset tuple is polynomially decidable. The question whether the functional-analytic approach can be extended to the h-primitivity is addressed and several open problems are formulated.