Separability and Non-Determinizability of WSTS

There is a recent separability result for the languages of well-structured transition systems (WSTS) that is surprisingly general: disjoint WSTS languages are always separated by a regular language. The result assumes that one of the languages is accepted by a deterministic WSTS, and it is not known whether this assumption is needed. There are two ways to get rid of the assumption, none of which has led to conclusions so far: (i) show that WSTS can be determinized or (ii) generalize the separability result to non-deterministic WSTS languages. Our contribution is to show that (i) does not work but (ii) does. As for (i), we give a non-deterministic WSTS language that we prove cannot be accepted by a deterministic WSTS. The proof relies on a novel characterization of the languages accepted by deterministic WSTS. As for (ii), we show how to find finitely represented inductive invariants without having the tool of ideal decompositions at hand. Instead, we work with closures under converging sequences. Our results hold for upward- and downward-compatible WSTS.