Emptiness of Ordered Multi-Pushdown Automata is 2ETIME-Complete

We consider ordered multi-pushdown automata, a multi-stack extension of pushdown automata that comes with a constraint on stack operations: a pop can only be performed on the first non-empty stack (which implies that we assume a linear ordering on the collection of stacks). We show that the emptiness problem for multi-pushdown automata is 2ETIME-complete. Containment in 2ETIME is shown by translating an automaton into a grammar for which we can check if the generated language is empty. The lower bound is established by simulating the behavior of an alternating Turing machine working in exponential space. We also compare ordered multi-pushdown automata with the model of bounded-phase (visibly) multi-stack pushdown automata, which do not impose an ordering on stacks, but restrict the number of alternations of pop operations on different stacks.