Mortality and Edge-to-Edge Reachability are Decidable on Surfaces

The mortality problem for a given dynamical system S consists of determining whether every trajectory of S eventually halts. In this work, we show that this problem is decidable for the class of piecewise constant derivative systems on two-dimensional manifolds, also called surfaces (PCD2m). Two closely related open problems are point-to-point and edge-to-edge reachability for PCD2m. Building on our technique to establish decidability of mortality for PCD2m, we show that the edge-to-edge reachability problem for these systems is also decidable. In this way we solve the edge-to-edge reachability case of an open problem due to Asarin, Mysore, Pnueli and Schneider [4]. This implies that the interval-to-interval version of the classical open problem of reachability for regular piecewise affine maps (PAMs) is also decidable. In other words, point-to-point reachability for regular PAMs can be effectively approximated with arbitrarily precision.