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Publications - Trace Refinement in Labelled Markov Decision Processes

Reference:

Nathanaël Fijalkow, Stefan Kiefer, and Mahsa Shirmohammadi. Trace refinement in labelled Markov decision processes. In Bart Jacobs and Christof Löding, editors, Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures (FoSSaCS), volume 9634 of LNCS, pages 303–318, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 2016. Springer.

Abstract:

Given two labelled Markov decision processes (MDPs), the trace-refinement problem asks whether for all strategies of the first MDP there exists a strategy of the second MDP such that the induced labelled Markov chains are trace-equivalent. We show that this problem is decidable in polynomial time if the second MDP is a Markov chain. The algorithm is based on new results on a particular notion of bisimulation between distributions over the states. However, we show that the general trace-refinement problem is undecidable, even if the first MDP is a Markov chain. Decidability of those problems was stated as open in 2008. We further study the decidability and complexity of the trace-refinement problem provided that the strategies are restricted to be memoryless.

Suggested BibTeX entry:

@inproceedings{16FKS-FOSSACS,
    address = {Eindhoven, The Netherlands},
    author = {Nathana{\"e}l Fijalkow and Stefan Kiefer and Mahsa Shirmohammadi},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures (FoSSaCS)},
    editor = {Bart Jacobs and Christof L{\"o}ding},
    pages = {303--318},
    publisher = {Springer},
    series = {LNCS},
    title = {Trace Refinement in Labelled {M}arkov Decision Processes},
    volume = {9634},
    year = {2016}
}

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