Timed Parity Games: Complexity and Robustness

Abstract

We consider two-player games played in real time on game structures with clocks and parity objectives. The games are concurrent in that at each turn, both players independently propose a time delay and an action, and the action with the shorter delay is chosen. To prevent a player from winning by blocking time, we restrict each player to strategies that ensure that the player cannot be responsible for causing a zeno run. First, we present an efficient reduction of these games to turn-based (i.e., nonconcurrent) finite-state (i.e., untimed) parity games. The states of the resulting game are pairs of clock regions of the original game. Our reduction improves the best known complexity for solving timed parity games. Moreover, the rich class of algorithms for classical parity games can now be applied to timed parity games.

Second, we consider two restricted classes of strategies for the player that represents the controller in a real-time synthesis problem, namely, limit-robust and bounded-robust strategies. Using a limit-robust strategy, the controller cannot choose an exact real-valued time delay but must allow for some nonzero jitter in each of its actions. If there is a given lower bound on the jitter, then the strategy is bounded-robust. We show that exact strategies are more powerful than limit-robust strategies, which are more powerful than bounded-robust strategies for any bound. For both kinds of robust strategies, we present efficient reductions to standard timed automaton games. These reductions provide algorithms for the synthesis of robust real-time controllers.

This research was supported in part by the NSF grants CCR-0132780, CNS-0720884, and CCR-0225610, and by the European COMBEST project.