Decomposing permutation automata

A deterministic finite automaton (DFA) 𝒜 is composite if its language L(𝒜) can be decomposed into an intersection ⋂_{i = 1}^k L(𝒜_i) of languages of smaller DFAs. Otherwise, 𝒜 is prime. This notion of primality was introduced by Kupferman and Mosheiff in 2013, and while they proved that we can decide whether a DFA is composite, the precise complexity of this problem is still open, with a doubly-exponential gap between the upper and lower bounds. In this work, we focus on permutation DFAs, i.e., those for which the transition monoid is a group. We provide an NP algorithm to decide whether a permutation DFA is composite, and show that the difficulty of this problem comes from the number of non-accepting states of the instance: we give a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm with the number of rejecting states as the parameter. Moreover, we investigate the class of commutative permutation DFAs. Their structural properties allow us to decide compositionality in NL, and even in LOGSPACE if the alphabet size is fixed. Despite this low complexity, we show that complex behaviors still arise in this class: we provide a family of composite DFAs each requiring polynomially many factors with respect to its size. We also consider the variant of the problem that asks whether a DFA is k-factor composite, that is, decomposable into k smaller DFAs, for some given integer k ∈ ℕ. We show that, for commutative permutation DFAs, restricting the number of factors makes the decision computationally harder, and yields a problem with tight bounds: it is NP-complete. Finally, we show that in general, this problem is in PSPACE, and it is in LOGSPACE for DFAs with a singleton alphabet.