Alternating timed automata

Abstract

A notion of alternating timed automata is proposed. It is shown that such automata with only one clock have decidable emptiness problem. This gives a new class of timed languages which is closed under boolean operations and which has an effective presentation. We prove that the complexity of the emptiness problem for alternating timed automata with one clock is non-primitive recursive. The proof gives also the same lower bound for the universality problem for nondeterministic timed automata with one clock thereby answering a question asked in a recent paper by Ouaknine and Worrell. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.