Reachability in Cooperating Systems with Architectural Constraints is PSPACE-Complete

The reachability problem in cooperating systems is known to be PSPACE-complete. We show here that this problem remains PSPACE-complete when we restrict the communication structure between the subsystems in various ways. For this purpose we introduce two basic and incomparable subclasses of cooperating systems that occur often in practice and provide respective reductions. The subclasses we consider consist of cooperating systems the communication structure of which forms a line respectively a star.