Reversible pushdown automata

Abstract

Reversible pushdown automata are deterministic pushdown automata that are also backward deterministic. Therefore, they have the property that any configuration occurring in any computation has exactly one predecessor. In this paper, the computational capacity of reversible computations in pushdown automata is investigated and turns out to lie properly in between the regular and deterministic context-free languages. Furthermore, it is shown that a deterministic context-free language cannot be accepted reversibly if more than realtime is necessary for acceptance. Closure properties as well as decidability questions for reversible pushdown automata are studied. Finally, we show that the problem to decide whether a given nondeterministic or deterministic pushdown automaton is reversible is P-complete, whereas it is undecidable whether the language accepted by a given nondeterministic pushdown automaton is reversible.