A deterministic parallel algorithm for the homing sequence problem

Abstract

Homing sequences play an important role in the testing of finite state systems and have been used in a number of applications such as hardware fault detection, protocol verification, and learning algorithms etc. Recent applications of homing sequences involve large DFAs with thousands of states. Such applications motivate the design of a parallel algorithm for this problem. The author present a deterministic parallel algorithm of time complexity O(/spl radic/nlog/sup 2/n) using a polynomial number of processors on the CREW PRAM model. No faster deterministic parallel algorithm is known for this problem. The author also discusses the parallel complexity of some related problems.