The Polynomial Complexity of Vector Addition Systems with States

Vector addition systems are an important model in theoretical computer science and have been used in a variety of areas. In this paper, we consider vector addition systems with states over a parameterized initial configuration. For these systems, we are interested in the standard notion of computational time complexity, i.e., we want to understand the length of the longest trace for a fixed vector addition system with states depending on the size of the initial configuration. We show that the asymptotic complexity of a given vector addition system with states is either [Formula: see text] for some computable integer k, where N is the size of the initial configuration, or at least exponential. We further show that k can be computed in polynomial time in the size of the considered vector addition system. Finally, we show that [Formula: see text] , where n is the dimension of the considered vector addition system.