Adaptive Homing is in P

Abstract: Homing preset and adaptive experiments with Finite State Machines (FSMs) are widely used when a non-initialized discrete event system is given for testing and thus, has to be set to the known state at the first step. The length of a shortest homing sequence is known to be exponential with respect to the number of states for a complete observable nondeterministic FSM while the problem of checking the existence of such sequence (Homing problem) is PSPACE-complete. In order to decrease the complexity of related problems, one can consider adaptive experiments when a next input to be applied to a system under experiment depends on the output responses to the previous inputs. In this paper, we study the problem of the existence of an adaptive homing experiment for complete observable nondeterministic machines. We show that if such experiment exists then it can be constructed with the use of a polynomial-time algorithm with respect to the number of FSM states.