English | PDF(True) | 2006 | 183 Pages | ISBN : 3540329226 | 1.7 MB

This book studies the relationship between automata and monadic second-order logic, focusing on classes of automata that describe the concurrent behavior of distributed systems. It provides a unifying theory of communicating automata and their logical properties. Based on Hanf's Theorem and Thomas's graph acceptors, it develops a result that allows characterization of many popular models of distributed computation in terms of the existential fragment of monadic second-order logic.