Bisimulation Finiteness of Pushdown Systems Is Elementary

We show that in case a pushdown system is bisimulation equivalent to a finite system, there is already a bisimulation equivalent finite system whose size is elementarily bounded in the description size of the pushdown system. As a consequence we obtain that it is elementarily decidable if a given pushdown system is bisimulation equivalent to some finite system. This improves a previously best-known ACK-ERMANN upper bound for this problem.

• Theory of computation → Logic and verification; Grammars and context-free languages.