Deciding Fast Termination for Probabilistic VASS with Nondeterminism

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Authors

BRÁZDIL Tomáš CHATTERJEE Krishnendu KUČERA Antonín NOVOTNÝ Petr VELAN Dominik

Year of publication 2019
Type Article in Proceedings
Conference Automated Technology for Verification and Analysis - 17th International Symposium, ATVA 2019, Proceedings
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Informatics

Citation
Web https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31784-3_27
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31784-3_27
Keywords angelic and demonic nondeterminism; termination time; probabilistic VASS
Description A probabilistic vector addition system with states (pVASS) is a finite state Markov process augmented with non-negative integer counters that can be incremented or decremented during each state transition, blocking any behaviour that would cause a counter to decrease below zero. The pVASS can be used as abstractions of probabilistic programs with many decidable properties. The use of pVASS as abstractions requires the presence of nondeterminism in the model. In this paper, we develop techniques for checking fast termination of pVASS with nondeterminism. That is, for every initial configuration of size n, we consider the worst expected number of transitions needed to reach a configuration with some counter negative (the expected termination time). We show that the problem whether the asymptotic expected termination time is linear is decidable in polynomial time for a certain natural class of pVASS with nondeterminism. Furthermore, we show the following dichotomy: if the asymptotic expected termination time is not linear, then it is at least quadratic, i.e., in Omega(n^2).
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