On the complexity and decidability of some problems involving shuffle

The complexity and decidability of various decision problems involving the shuffle operation (denoted by ) are studied. The following three problems are all shown to be NP-complete: given a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) M , and two words u and v, is L(M) 6⊆ u v, is u v 6⊆ L(M), and is L(M) 6= u v? It is also shown that there is a polynomial-time algorithm to determine, for NFAs M1,M2 and a deterministic pushdown automaton M3, whether L(M1) L(M2) ⊆ L(M3). The same is true when M1,M2,M3 are one-way nondeterministic l-reversal-bounded k-counter machines, with M3 being deterministic. Other decidability and complexity results are presented for testing whether given languages L1, L2 and R from various languages families satisfy L1 L2 ⊆ R, and R ⊆ L1 L2. Several closure results on shuffle are also shown.