Deterministic set automata

Abstract

We consider the model of deterministic set automata which are basically deterministic finite automata equipped with a set as an additional storage medium. The basic operations on the set are the insertion of elements, the removing of elements, and the test whether or not an element is in the set. We investigate the computational power of deterministic set automata and compare the language class accepted with the context-free languages and classes of languages accepted by queue automata. As results the incomparability to all classes considered is obtained. In the second part of the paper, we examine the closure properties of the class of DSA languages under Boolean operations. Finally, we show that deterministic set automata may be an interesting model from a practical point of view by proving that their emptiness problem is decidable.