Residual finite state automata

We define a new variety of Nondeterministic Finite Automata (NFA): a Residual Finite State Automaton (RFSA) is an NFA all the states of which define residual languages of the language L that it recognizes; a residual language according to a word u is the set of words v such that uv is in L. We prove that every regular language is recognized by a unique (canonical) RFSA which has a minimal number of states and a maximal number of transitions. Canonical RFSAs are based on the notion of prime residual languages, i.e. that are not the union of other residual languages. C C We provide an algorithmic construction of the canonical RFSA similar to the subset construction used to build the minimal DFA from a given NFA. We study the size of canonical RFSAs and the complexity of our constructions.