Approximate Analysis of Probabilistic Processes: Logic, Simulation and Games

We tackle the problem of non robustness of simulation and bisimulation when dealing with probabilistic processes. It is important to ignore tiny deviations in probabilities because these often come from experiments or estimations. A few approaches have been proposed to treat this issue, for example metrics to quantify the non bisimilarity (or closeness) of processes. Relaxing the definition of simulation and bisimulation is another avenue which we follow. We define a new semantics to a known simple logic for probabilistic processes and show that it characterises a notion of epsi-simulation. We also define two-players games that correspond to these notions: the existence of a winning strategy for one of the players determines epsi-(bi)simulation. Of course, for all the notions defined, letting epsi = 0 gives back the usual notions of logical equivalence, simulation and bisimulation. However, in contrast to what happens in fully probabilistic systems when epsi = 0, two-way e-simulation for epsi > 0 is not equal to epsi-bisimulation. Next we give a polynomial time algorithm to compute a naturally derived metric: distance between states s and t is defined as the smallest epsi such that s and t are epsi-equivalent. This is the first polynomial algorithm for a non-discounted metric. Finally we show that most of these notions can be extended to deal with probabilistic systems that allow non-determinism as well.