Analyzing Value Functions of States in Parametric Markov Chains

Parametric Markov chains (pMC) are used to model probabilistic systems with unknown or partially known probabilities. Although (universal) pMC verification for reachability properties is known to be coETR-complete, there have been efforts to approach it using potentially easier-to-check properties such as asking whether the pMC is monotonic in certain parameters. In this paper, we first reduce monotonicity to asking whether the reachability probability from a given state is never less than that of another given state. Recent results for the latter property imply an efficient algorithm to collapse same-value equivalence classes, which in turn preserves verification results and monotonicity. We implement our algorithm to collapse "trivial" equivalence classes in the pMC and show empirical evidence for the following: First, the collapse gives reductions in size for some existing benchmarks and significant reductions on some custom benchmarks; Second, the collapse speeds up existing algorithms to check monotonicity and parameter lifting, and hence can be used as a fast pre-processing step in practice.

Graph-Based Reductions for Parametric and Weighted MDPs

We study the complexity of reductions for weighted reachability in parametric Markov decision processes. That is, we say a state p is never worse than q if for all valuations of the polynomial indeterminates it is the case that the maximal expected weight that can be reached from p is greater than the same value from q. In terms of computational complexity, we establish that determining whether p is never worse than q is coETR-complete. On the positive side, we give a polynomial-time algorithm to compute the equivalence classes of the order we study for Markov chains. Additionally, we describe and implement two inference rules to under-approximate the never-worse relation and empirically show that it can be used as an efficient preprocessing step for the analysis of large Markov decision processes.