The purpose of this paper is twofold: (a) to provide a tutorial introduction to some key concepts from the theory of computational complexity, highlighting their relevance to systems and control theory, and (b) to survey the relatively recent research activity lying at the interface between these fields. We begin with a brief introduction to models of computation, the concepts of undecidability, polynomial time algorithms, NP-completeness, and the implications of intractability results. We then survey a number of problems that arise in systems and control theory, some of them classical, some of them related to current research. We discuss them from the point of view of computational complexity and also point out many open problems. In particular, we consider problems related to stability or stabilizability of linear systems with parametric uncertainty, robust control, time-varying linear systems, nonlinear and hybrid systems, and stochastic optimal control.

We analyse the computability and the complexity of various definitions of spectral radii for sets of matrices. We show that the joint and generalized spectral radii of two integer matrices are not approximable in polynomial time, and that two related quantities -- the lower spectral radius and the largest Lyapunov exponent -- are not algorithmically approximable.

We formalize the Dolev-Yao model of security protocols, using a notation based on multi-set rewriting with existentials. The goals are to provide a simple formal notation for describing security protocols, to formalize the assumptions of the Dolev-Yao model using this notation, and to analyze the complexity of the secrecy problem under various restrictions. We prove that, even for the case where we restrict the size of messages and the depth of message encryption, the secrecy problem is undecidable for the case of an unrestricted number of protocol roles and an unbounded number of new nonces. We also identify several decidable classes, including a dexp-complete class when the number of nonces is restricted, and an np-complete class when both the number of nonces and the number of roles is restricted. We point out a remaining open complexity problem, and discuss the implications these results have on the general topic of protocol analysis.

Automated planning, the problem of how an agent achieves a goal given a repertoire of actions, is one of the foundational and most widely studied problems in the AI literature. The original formulation of the problem makes strong assumptions regarding the agent's knowledge and control over the world, namely that its information is complete and correct, and that the results of its actions are deterministic and known.

We prove that several problems associated to probabilistic finite automata are undecidable for automata whose number of input letters and number of states are fixed. As a corollary of one of our results we prove that the problem of determining if the set of all products of two 47 × 47 matrices with nonnegative rational entries is bounded is undecidable.

this paper, weconsider simple classes of nonlinear systems and provethatbasic questions related to their stabilityandcontrollabilityare either undecidable or computationally intractable (NP-hard). As a special case, weconsider a class of hybrid systems in which the state space is partitioned into two halfspaces, and the dynamics in eachhalfspace correspond to a differentlinear system

A set of matrices over the integers is said to be length-k-mortal (with positive integer) if the zero matrix can be expressed as a product of length of matrices in the set. The set is said to be mortal if it is length-k-mortal for some finite k.

We study the following decision problem: is the language recognized by a quantum finite automaton empty or non-empty? We prove that this problem is decidable or undecidable depending on whether recognition is defined by strict or non-strict thresholds. This result is in contrast with the corresponding situation for probabilistic-finite automata for which it is known that strict and non-strict thresholds both lead to undecidable problems.

In an instance of the Post Correspondence Problem we are given two morphisms h; g : A

We present a new shorter and simplified proof for the undecidability of the mortality problem in matrix semigroups, originally proved by Paterson in 1970. We use the clever coding technique introduced by Paterson to achieve also a new result, the undecidability of the vanishing (left) upper corner. Since our proof for the undecidability of the mortality problem uses only 8 matrices, a new bound for the dimension for the undecidability of the mortality in the two generator matrix semigroup is achieved.