Reactive automata

A reactive automaton has extra links whose role is to change the behaviour of the automaton. We show that these links do not increase the expressiveness of finite automata but that they can be used to reduce dramatically their state number both in the deterministic case and the non-deterministic case.Typical examples of regular expressions associated with deterministic automata of exponential size according to the length of the expression show that reactive links provide an alternative representation of total linear size for the language.