Distributed Processing in Automata

With distributed computing beginning to play a major role in modern Computer Science, the theory of grammar systems and distributed automata has been developed in order to model distributed computing. In this paper, we introduce the notion of distributed automata in the sequential sense. Distributed Automata are a group of automata working in unison to accept one language. We build the theory of distributed automata for FSA and PDA in different modes of acceptance like the t-mode, *-mode, = k-mode, ≤ k-mode and ≥ k-mode. We then analyze the acceptance power of each automata in all the above modes. We present proofs that distributed FSA do not have any additional power over “centralized” FSAs in any of the modes, while distributed PDA with only two components is as powerful as Turing Machines in all of the modes. We give proofs for the equivalence of all modes in the case of PDAs. We also study a restricted version of distributed PDA called k-turn distributed PDA.