Synchronizing Strategies under Partial Observability

Embedded devices usually share only partial information about their current configurations as the communication bandwidth can be restricted. Despite this, we may wish to bring a failed device into a given predetermined configuration. This problem, also known as resetting or synchronizing words, has been intensively studied for systems that do not provide any information about their configurations. In order to capture more general scenarios, we extend the existing theory of synchronizing words to synchronizing strategies, and study the synchronization, short-synchronization and subset-to-subset synchronization problems under partial observability. We provide a comprehensive complexity analysis of these problems, concluding that for deterministic systems the complexity of the problems under partial observability remains the same as for the classical synchronization problems, whereas for nondeterministic systems the complexity increases already for systems with just two observations, as we can now encode alternation.