Searching for a minimal finite state automaton (FSA)

Abstract

An efficient algorithm to search for a minimal finite state automaton (FSA) is presented. This algorithm eliminates all the redundant states in a given FSA and is guaranteed to produce an optimal solution for a reduced FSA. The performance is achieved because of the application of a fail-first heuristics in search tree level and nodal ordering and taking advantage of an efficient search space pruning criterion in search tree generation and in the search process.<>