Weighted Automata, Formal Power Series and Weighted Logic

The main objective of this work is to represent the behaviors of weighted automata by expressively equivalent formalisms: rational operations on formal power series, linear representations by means of matrices, and weighted monadic second-order logic. 

First, we exhibit the classical results of Kleene, Büchi, Elgot and Trakhtenbrot, which concentrate on the expressive power of finite automata. We f...