text: Motivated by the successful application of the theory of regular languages to formal verification of finite-state systems, there is a renewed interest in developing a theory of analyzable functions from strings to numerical values that can provide a foundation for analyzing quantitative properties of finitestate systems. In this paper, we propose a deterministic model for associating costs with strings that is parameterized by operations of interest (such as addition, scaling, and min), a notion of regularity that provides a yardstick to measure expressiveness, and study decision problems and theoretical properties of resulting classes of cost functions. Our definition of regularity relies on the theory of string-to-tree transducers, and allows associating costs with events that are conditional upon regular properties of future events. Our model of cost register automata allows computation of regular functions using multiple “write-only” registers whose values can be combined using the allowed set of operations. We show that classical shortest-path algorithms as well as algorithms designed for computing discounted costs, can be adopted for solving the min-cost problems for the more general classes of functions specified in our model. Cost register automata with min and increment give a deterministic model that is equivalent to weighted automata, an extensively studied nondeterministic model, and this connection results in new insights and new open problems.
  @cite_18: Motivated by formal models recently proposed in the context of XML, we study automata and logics on strings over infinite alphabets. These are conservative extensions of classical automata and logics defining the regular languages on finite alphabets. Specifically, we consider register and pebble automata, and extensions of first-order logic and monadic second-order logic. For each type of automaton we consider one-way and two-way variants, as well as deterministic, nondeterministic, and alternating control. We investigate the expressiveness and complexity of the automata and their connection to the logics, as well as standard decision problems. Some of our results answer open questions of Kaminski and Francez on register automata.
  @cite_4: With motivation from considerations in XML database theory and model checking, data strings have been introduced as an extension of finite alphabet strings which carry, at each position, a symbol and a data value from an infinite domain. Previous work has shown that it is difficult to come up with an expressive yet decidable automaton model for data languages. Recently, such a model, data automata, was introduced. This paper introduces a simpler but equivalent model and investigates its expressive power, algorithmic and closure properties, and some extensions.
  @cite_6: 
summary: Data languages allow finite strings over data values that can be drawn from a possibly infinite data domain @cite_18 , @cite_6 @cite_4 . Register automata are often used as acceptors for data languages. A key feature of such automata is that they allow registers to store and test data values. Beyond the similarity in nomenclature, register automata that are studied in this line of work are quite distinct from cost register automata introduced in this paper. The former are essentially defined over an infinite input alphabet, and the critical difference lies in the fact that almost every variant of data automata allows testing equality of data values, which mostly causes interesting decision problems to become undecidable. Cost register automata use the cost registers in a strictly write-only fashion, which makes them incomparable to variants of data automata that use read write registers.