Automata-Based Stream Processing

We propose an automata-theoretic framework for modularly expressing computations on streams of data. With weighted automata as a starting point, we identify three key features that are useful for an automaton model for stream processing: expressing the regular decomposition of streams whose data items are elements of a complex type (e.g., tuple of values), allowing the hierarchical nesting of several different kinds of aggregations, and specifying modularly the parallel execution and combination of various subcomputations. The combination of these features leads to subtle efficiency considerations that concern the interaction between nondeterminism, hierarchical nesting, and parallelism. We identify a syntactic restriction where the nondeterminism is unambiguous and parallel subcomputations synchronize their outputs. For automata satisfying these restrictions, we show that there is a spaceand time-efficient streaming evaluation algorithm. We also prove that when these restrictions are relaxed, the evaluation problem becomes inherently computationally expensive. 1998 ACM Subject Classification F.1.1 Models of Computation