The Diagonal Problem for Higher-Order Recursion Schemes is Decidable

A non-deterministic recursion scheme recognizes a language of fi-nite trees. This very expressive model can simulate, among others, higher-order pushdown automata with collapse. We show decidability of the diagonal problem for schemes. This result has several interesting consequences. In particular, it gives an algorithm that computes the downward closure of languages of words recognized by schemes. In turn, this has immediate application to separability problems and reachability analysis of concurrent systems.Categories and Subject Descriptors 500 [Theory of computation]: Grammars and context-free languages; 500 [Theory of computation]: Tree languages; 500 [Theory of computation]: Regular languages