Urgency Annotations for Alternating Choices

Abstract

We propose urgency programs, a new programming model with support for alternation, imperfect information, and recursion. The novelty are urgency annotations that decorate the (angelic and demonic) choice operators and control the order in which alternation is resolved. We study standard notions of contextual equivalence for urgency programs. Our first main result are fully abstract characterizations of these relations based on sound and complete axiomatizations. Our second main result settles their computability via a normal form construction. Notably, we show that the contextual preorder is (2h-1)-EXPTIME-complete for programs of maximal urgency h when the regular observable is given as an input resp. PTIME-complete when the regular observable is fixed. We designed urgency programs as a framework in which it is convenient to formulate and study verification and synthesis problems. We demonstrate this on a number of examples including the verification of concurrent and recursive programs and hyper model checking.