Probabilistic automata (PAs) have been successfully applied in formal verification of concurrent and stochastic systems. Efficient model checking algorithms have been studied, where the most often used logics for expressing properties are based on probabilistic computation tree logic (PCTL) and its extension PCTL^*. Various behavioral equivalences are proposed, as a powerful tool for abstraction and compositional minimization for PAs. Unfortunately, the equivalences are well-known to be sound, but not complete with respect to the logical equivalences induced by PCTL or PCTL*. The desire of a both sound and complete behavioral equivalence has been pointed out by Segala in 1995, but remains open throughout the years. In this paper we introduce novel notions of strong bisimulation relations, which characterize PCTL and PCTL* exactly. We extend weak bisimulations that characterize PCTL and PCTL* without next operator, respectively. Further, we also extend the framework to simulation preorders. Thus, our paper bridges the gap between logical and behavioral equivalences and preorders in this setting.
Verification of PCTL properties of MDPs with convex uncertainties has been investigated recently by Puggelli et al. However, model checking algorithms typically suffer from state space explosion. In this paper, we address probabilistic bisimulation to reduce the size of such an MDPs while preserving PCTL properties it satisfies. We discuss different interpretations of uncertainty in the models which are studied in the literature and that result in two different definitions of bisimulations. We give algorithms to compute the quotients of these bisimulations in time polynomial in the size of the…
Probabilistic timed automata are an extension of timed automata with discrete probability distributions. We consider model-checking algorithms for the subclasses of probabilistic timed automata which have one or two clocks. Firstly, we show that PCTL probabilistic model-checking problems (such as determining whether a set of target states can be reached with probability at least 0.99 regardless of how nondeterminism is resolved) are PTIME-complete for one-clock probabilistic timed automata, and are EXPTIME-complete for probabilistic timed automata with two clocks. Secondly, we show that, for o…
We consider the model checking problem for probabilistic pushdown automata (pPDA) and properties expressible in various probabilistic logics. We start with properties that can be formulated as instances of a generalized random walk problem. We prove that both qualitative and quantitative model checking for this class of properties and pPDA is decidable. Then we show that model checking for the qualitative fragment of the logic PCTL and pPDA is also decidable. Moreover, we develop an error-tolerant model checking algorithm for PCTL and the subclass of stateless pPDA. Finally, we consider the cl…
Two formal stochastic models are said to be bisimilar if their solutions as a stochastic process are probabilistically equivalent. Bisimilarity between two stochastic model formalisms means that the strengths of one stochastic model formalism can be used by the other stochastic model formalism. The aim of this paper is to explain bisimilarity relations between stochastic hybrid automata, stochastic differential equations on hybrid space and stochastic hybrid Petri nets. These bisimilarity relations make it possible to combine the formal verification power of automata with the analysis power of…
Bisimulations and Modal Logics for Higher Dimensional Automata
Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）；University of Warsaw（华沙大学）
In this paper we show that classical notions from automata theory such as simulation and bisimulation can be lifted to the context of enriched categories. The usual properties of bisimulation are nearly all preserved in this new context. The class of enriched functors that correspond to functionnal bisimulations surjective on objects is investigated and appears "nearly" open in the sense of Joyal and Moerdijk. Seeing the change of base techniques as a convenient means to define process refinement/abstractions, we give sufficient conditions for the change of base categories to preserve bisimula…
Probabilistic automata were introduced by Rabin in 1963 as language acceptors. Two automata are equivalent if and only if they accept each word with the same probability. On the other side, in the process algebra community, probabilistic automata were re-proposed by Segala in 1995 which are more general than Rabin's automata. Bisimulations have been proposed for Segala's automata to characterize the equivalence between them. So far the two notions of equivalences and their characteristics have been studied most independently. In this paper, we consider Segala's automata, and propose a novel no…
This paper develops a decision algorithm for weak bisimulation on Markov Automata (MA). For that purpose, different notions of vanishing state (a concept known from the area of Generalised Stochastic Petri Nets) are defined. Vanishing states are shown to be essential for relating the concepts of (state-based) naive weak bisimulation and (distribution-based) weak bisimulation. The bisimulation algorithm presented here follows the partition-refinement scheme and has exponential time complexity.
There are two kinds of bisimulation, namely crisp and fuzzy, between fuzzy structures such as fuzzy automata, fuzzy labeled transition systems, fuzzy Kripke models and fuzzy interpretations in description logics. Fuzzy bisimulations between fuzzy automata over a complete residuated lattice have been introduced by Ćirić et al. in 2012. Logical characterizations of fuzzy bisimulations between fuzzy Kripke models (respectively, fuzzy interpretations in description logics) over the residuated lattice [0,1] with the Gödel t-norm have been provided by Fan in 2015 (respectively, Nguyen et al. in 2020…
Probabilistic automata constitute a versatile and elegant model for concurrent probabilistic systems. They are equipped with a compositional theory supporting abstraction, enabled by weak probabilistic bisimulation serving as the reference notion for summarising the effect of abstraction. This paper considers probabilistic automata augmented with costs. It extends the notions of weak transitions in probabilistic automata in such a way that the costs incurred along a weak transition are captured. This gives rise to cost-preserving and cost-bounding variations of weak probabilistic bisimilarity,…
Model checking timed automata becomes increasingly complex with the increase in the number of clocks. Hence it is desirable that one constructs an automaton with the minimum number of clocks possible. The problem of checking whether there exists a timed automaton with a smaller number of clocks such that the timed language accepted by the original automaton is preserved is known to be undecidable. In this paper, we give a construction, which for any given timed automaton produces a timed bisimilar automaton with the least number of clocks. Further, we show that such an automaton with the minim…
Establishing equivalences between programs or systems is crucial both for verifying correctness of programs, by establishing that two implementations are equivalent, and for justifying optimisations and program transformations, by establishing that a modified program is equivalent to the source one. There exist several equivalence relations for programs, and bisimulations are among the most versatile of these equivalences. Among bisimulation relations one distinguishes strong bisimulation, that requires that each action of a program is simulated by a single action of the equivalent program, a …
Generalizing standard monadic second-order logic for Kripke models, we introduce monadic second-order logic interpreted over coalgebras for an arbitrary set functor. Similar to well-known results for monadic second-order logic over trees, we provide a translation of this logic into a class of automata, relative to the class of coalgebras that admit a tree-like supporting Kripke frame. We then consider invariance under behavioral equivalence of formulas; more in particular, we investigate whether the coalgebraic mu-calculus is the bisimulation-invariant fragment of monadic second-order logic. B…
Checking whether two pushdown automata with restricted silent actions are weakly bisimilar was shown decidable by Sénizergues (1998, 2005). We provide the first known complexity upper bound for this famous problem, in the equivalent setting of first-order grammars. This ACKERMANN upper bound is optimal, and we also show that strong bisimilarity is primitive-recursive when the number of states of the automata is fixed.
Deterministic graph grammars generate regular graphs, that form a structural extension of configuration graphs of pushdown systems. In this paper, we study a probabilistic extension of regular graphs obtained by labelling the terminal arcs of the graph grammars by probabilities. Stochastic properties of these graphs are expressed using PCTL, a probabilistic extension of computation tree logic. We present here an algorithm to perform approximate verification of PCTL formulae. Moreover, we prove that the exact model-checking problem for PCTL on probabilistic regular graphs is undecidable, unless…
A new weak bisimulation semantics is defined for Markov automata that, in addition to abstracting from internal actions, sums up the expected values of consecutive exponentially distributed delays possibly intertwined with internal actions. The resulting equivalence is shown to be a congruence with respect to parallel composition for Markov automata. Moreover, it turns out to be comparable with weak bisimilarity for timed labeled transition systems, thus constituting a step towards reconciling the semantics for stochastic time and deterministic time.
Witnessing subsystems have proven to be a useful concept in the analysis of probabilistic systems, for example as diagnostic information on why a given property holds or as input to refinement algorithms. This paper introduces witnessing subsystems for reachability problems in probabilistic timed automata (PTA). Using a new operation on difference bounds matrices, it is shown how Farkas certificates of finite-state bisimulation quotients of a PTA can be translated into witnessing subsystems. We present algorithms for the computation of minimal witnessing subsystems under three notions of minim…
Our main contributions can be divided in three parts: (1) Fixpoint extensions of first-order logic: we give a precise syntactic and semantic characterization of the relationship between $\mathrm{FO(TC^1)}$ and $\mathrm{FO(LFP)}$; (2) Automata and expressiveness on trees: we introduce a new class of parity automata which, on trees, captures the expressive power of $\mathrm{FO(TC^1)}$ and WCL (weak chain logic). The latter logic is a variant of MSO which quantifies over finite chains; and (3) Expressiveness modulo bisimilarity: we show that PDL is expressively equivalent to the bisimulation-inva…
We prove that the bisimulation-invariant fragment of weak monadic second-order logic (WMSO) is equivalent to the fragment of the modal $μ$-calculus where the application of the least fixpoint operator $μp.φ$ is restricted to formulas $φ$ that are continuous in $p$. Our proof is automata-theoretic in nature; in particular, we introduce a class of automata characterizing the expressive power of WMSO over tree models of arbitrary branching degree. The transition map of these automata is defined in terms of a logic $\mathrm{FOE}_1^\infty$ that is the extension of first-order logic with a generaliz…
The coalgebraic modelling of alternating automata and of probabilistic automata has long been obstructed by the absence of distributive laws of the powerset monad over itself, respectively of the powerset monad over the finite distribution monad. This can be fixed using the framework of weak distributive laws. We extend this framework to the case when one of the monads is only a functor. We provide abstract compositionality results, a generalized determinization procedure, and systematic soundness of up-to techniques. Along the way, we apply these results to alternating automata as a motivatin…
A decidability proof for bisimulation equivalence of first-order grammars (finite sets of labelled rules for rewriting roots of first-order terms) is presented. The equivalence generalizes the DPDA (deterministic pushdown automata) equivalence, and the result corresponds to the result achieved by Senizergues (1998, 2005) in the framework of equational graphs, or of PDA with restricted epsilon-steps. The framework of classical first-order terms seems particularly useful for providing a proof that should be understandable for a wider audience. We also discuss an extension to branching bisimilari…
We present a formulation of the problem of probabilistic model checking as one of query evaluation over probabilistic logic programs. To the best of our knowledge, our formulation is the first of its kind, and it covers a rich class of probabilistic models and probabilistic temporal logics. The inference algorithms of existing probabilistic logic-programming systems are well defined only for queries with a finite number of explanations. This restriction prohibits the encoding of probabilistic model checkers, where explanations correspond to executions of the system being model checked. To over…
A decidability proof for bisimulation equivalence of first-order grammars is given. It is an alternative proof for a result by Sénizergues (1998, 2005) that subsumes his affirmative solution of the famous decidability question for deterministic pushdown automata. The presented proof is conceptually simpler, and a particular novelty is that it is not given as two semidecision procedures but it provides an explicit algorithm that might be amenable to a complexity analysis.
Labeled state-to-function transition systems, FuTS for short, are characterized by transitions which relate states to functions of states over general semirings, equipped with a rich set of higher-order operators. As such, FuTS constitute a convenient modeling instrument to deal with process languages and their quantitative extensions in particular. In this paper, the notion of bisimulation induced by a FuTS is addressed from a coalgebraic point of view. A correspondence result is established stating that FuTS-bisimilarity coincides with behavioural equivalence of the associated functor. As ge…
We use the connection between automata and logic to prove that a wide class of coalgebraic fixpoint logics enjoys uniform interpolation. To this aim, first we generalize one of the central results in coalgebraic automata theory, namely closure under projection, which is known to hold for weak-pullback preserving functors, to a more general class of functors, i.e.; functors with quasi-functorial lax extensions. Then we will show that closure under projection implies definability of the bisimulation quantifier in the language of coalgebraic fixpoint logic, and finally we prove the uniform interp…
Probabilistic bisimulation is a fundamental notion of process equivalence for probabilistic systems. Among others, it has important applications including formalizing the anonymity property of several communication protocols. There is a lot of work on verifying probabilistic bisimulation for finite systems. This is however not the case for parameterized systems, where the problem is in general undecidable. In this paper we provide a generic framework for reasoning about probabilistic bisimulation for parameterized systems. Our approach is in the spirit of software verification, wherein we enco…
We present relaxed notions of simulation and bisimulation on Probabilistic Automata (PA), that allow some error epsilon. When epsilon is zero we retrieve the usual notions of bisimulation and simulation on PAs. We give logical characterisations of these notions by choosing suitable logics which differ from the elementary ones, L with negation and L without negation, by the modal operator. Using flow networks, we show how to compute the relations in PTIME. This allows the definition of an efficiently computable non-discounted distance between the states of a PA. A natural modification of this d…
Bisimulation equivalence (or bisimilarity) of first-order grammars is decidable, as follows from the decidability result by Senizergues (1998, 2005) that has been given in an equivalent framework of equational graphs with finite out-degree, or of pushdown automata (PDA) with only deterministic and popping epsilon-transitions. Benedikt, Goeller, Kiefer, and Murawski (2013) have shown that the bisimilarity problem for PDA (even) without epsilon-transitions is nonelementary. Here we show Ackermann-hardness for bisimilarity of first-order grammars. The grammars do not use explicit epsilon-transiti…
This paper contributes to the general understanding of the geometrical model of concurrency that was named higher dimensional automata (HDAs) by Pratt. In particular we investigate modal logics for such models and their expressive power in terms of the bisimulation that can be captured. The geometric model of concurrency is interesting from two main reasons: its generality and expressiveness, and the natural way in which autoconcurrency and action refinement are captured. Logics for this model, though, are not well investigated, where a simple, yet adequate, modal logic over HDAs was only rece…
We study (bi)simulation-like preorder/equivalence checking on the class of visibly pushdown automata and its natural subclasses visibly BPA (Basic Process Algebra) and visibly one-counter automata. We describe generic methods for proving complexity upper and lower bounds for a number of studied preorders and equivalences like simulation, completed simulation, ready simulation, 2-nested simulation preorders/equivalences and bisimulation equivalence. Our main results are that all the mentioned equivalences and preorders are EXPTIME-complete on visibly pushdown automata, PSPACE-complete on visibl…
We first propose algorithms for checking language equivalence of finite automata over a large alphabet. We use symbolic automata, where the transition function is compactly represented using a (multi-terminal) binary decision diagrams (BDD). The key idea consists in computing a bisimulation by exploring reachable pairs symbolically, so as to avoid redundancies. This idea can be combined with already existing optimisations, and we show in particular a nice integration with the disjoint sets forest data-structure from Hopcroft and Karp's standard algorithm. Then we consider Kleene algebra with t…
The main focus of this paper is on bisimulation-invariant MSO, and more particularly on giving a novel model-theoretic approach to it. In model theory, a model companion of a theory is a first-order description of the class of models in which all potentially solvable systems of equations and non-equations have solutions. We show that bisimulation-invariant MSO on trees gives the model companion for a new temporal logic, "fair CTL", an enrichment of CTL with local fairness constraints. To achieve this, we give a completeness proof for the logic fair CTL which combines tableaux and Stone duality…
Automata representing game-semantic models of programs are meant to operate in environments whose input-output behaviour is constrained by the rules of a game. This can lead to a notion of equivalence between states which is weaker than the conventional notion of bisimulation, since not all actions are available to the environment. An environment which attempts to break the rules of the game is, effectively, mounting a low-level attack against a system. In this paper we show how (and why) to enforce game rules in games-based hardware synthesis and how to use this weaker notion of equivalence, …
