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Bisimulation provides structural conditions to characterize indistinguishability from an external observer between nodes on labeled graphs. It is a fundamental notion used in many areas, such as verification, graph-structured databases, and constraint satisfaction. However, several current applications use graphs where nodes also contain data (the so called "data graphs"), and where observers can test for equality or inequality of data values (e.g., asking the attribute 'name' of a node to be different from that of all its neighbors). The present work constitutes a first investigation of "data aware" bisimulations on data graphs. We study the problem of computing such bisimulations, based on the observational indistinguishability for XPath ---a language that extends modal logics like PDL with tests for data equality--- with and without transitive closure operators. We show that in general the problem is PSpace-complete, but identify several restrictions that yield better complexity bounds (coNP, PTime) by controlling suitable parameters of the problem, namely the amount of non-locality allowed, and the class of models considered (graphs, DAGs, trees). In particular, this analysis yields a hierarchy of tractable fragments.

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Abstract. Well quasi-orders (wqo's) are an important mathematical tool for proving termination of many algorithms. Under some assumptions upper bounds for the computational complexity of such algorithms can be extracted by analyzing the length of controlled bad sequences. We develop a new, self-contained study of the length of bad sequences over the product ordering of N n , which leads to known results but with a much simpler argument. We also give a new tight upper bound for the length of the longest controlled descending sequence of multisets of N n , and use it to give an upper bound for the length of controlled bad sequences in the majoring ordering of sets of tuples. We apply this upper bound to obtain complexity upper bounds for decision procedures of automata over data trees. In both cases the idea is to linearize bad sequences, i.e. transform them into a descending one over a well-order for which upper bounds can be more easily handled.

Abstract. We study connections between the satisfiability problem for logics on data trees and Branching Vector Addition Systems (BVAS). We consider a natural temporal logic of "repeating values" (LRV) featuring an operator which tests whether a data value in the current node is repeated in some descendant node. On the one hand, we show that the satisfiability of a restricted version of LRV on ranked data trees can be reduced to the coverability problem for Branching Vector Addition Systems. This immediately gives elementary upper bounds for its satisfiability problem, showing that restricted LRV behaves much better than downward-XPath, which has a non-primitiverecursive satisfiability problem. On the other hand, satisfiability for LRV is shown to be reducible to the coverability for a novel branching model we introduce here, called Merging VASS (MVASS). MVASS is an extension of Branching Vector Addition Systems with States (BVASS) allowing richer merging operations of the vectors. We show that the control-state reachability for MVASS, as well as its bottom-up coverability, are in 3ExpTime. This work can be seen as a natural continuation of the work initiated by Demri, D'Souza and Gascon for the case of data words, this time considering branching structures and counter systems, although, as we show, in the case of data trees more powerful models are needed to encode satisfiability.