Quantitative Model Checking Revisited: Neither Decidable Nor Approximable

Quantitative model checking computes the probability values of a given property quantifying over all possible schedulers. It turns out that maximum and minimum probabilities calculated in such a way are overestimations on models of distributed systems in which components are loosely coupled and share little information with each other (and hence arbitrary schedulers may result too powerful). Therefore, we focus on the quantitative model checking problem restricted to distributed schedulers that are obtained only as a combination of local schedulers (i.e. the schedulers of each component) and show that this problem is undecidable. In fact, we show that there is no algorithm that can compute an approximation to the maximum probability of reaching a state within a given bound when restricted to distributed schedulers.

[1]  J. Kemeny,et al.  Denumerable Markov chains , 1969 .

[2]  William H. Press,et al.  Numerical recipes in C. The art of scientific computing , 1987 .

[3]  William H. Press,et al.  Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN - The Art of Scientific Computing, 2nd Edition , 1987 .

[4]  William H. Press,et al.  Numerical recipes in FORTRAN (2nd ed.): the art of scientific computing , 1992 .

[5]  Martin L. Puterman,et al.  Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming , 1994 .

[6]  W. Press,et al.  Numerical Recipes in Fortran: The Art of Scientific Computing.@@@Numerical Recipes in C: The Art of Scientific Computing. , 1994 .

[7]  Bernhard Steffen,et al.  Reactive, Generative and Stratified Models of Probabilistic Processes , 1995, Inf. Comput..

[8]  Andrea Bianco,et al.  Model Checking of Probabalistic and Nondeterministic Systems , 1995, FSTTCS.

[9]  Roberto Segala,et al.  Modeling and verification of randomized distributed real-time systems , 1996 .

[10]  Zohar Manna,et al.  Formal verification of probabilistic systems , 1997 .

[11]  L. D. Alfaro The Verification of Probabilistic Systems Under Memoryless Partial-Information Policies is Hard , 1999 .

[12]  Thomas A. Henzinger,et al.  Compositional Methods for Probabilistic Systems , 2001, CONCUR.

[13]  S. Tripakis,et al.  Undecidable problems of decentralized observation and control , 2001, Proceedings of the 40th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Cat. No.01CH37228).

[14]  R. Milner,et al.  Bigraphical Reactive Systems , 2001, CONCUR.

[15]  Mariëlle Stoelinga,et al.  Alea jacta est : verification of probabilistic, real-time and parametric systems , 2002 .

[16]  Anne Condon,et al.  On the undecidability of probabilistic planning and related stochastic optimization problems , 2003, Artif. Intell..

[17]  Christel Baier,et al.  Validation of Stochastic Systems , 2004, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[18]  Erik P. de Vink,et al.  Probabilistic Automata: System Types, Parallel Composition and Comparison , 2004, Validation of Stochastic Systems.

[19]  Rajeev Alur,et al.  A Temporal Logic of Nested Calls and Returns , 2004, TACAS.

[20]  Nancy A. Lynch,et al.  Switched PIOA: Parallel composition via distributed scheduling , 2006, Theor. Comput. Sci..

[21]  Ling Cheung,et al.  Reconciling nondeterministic and probabilistic choices , 2006 .

[22]  Andrew Hinton,et al.  PRISM: A Tool for Automatic Verification of Probabilistic Systems , 2006, TACAS.

[23]  Christel Baier,et al.  LiQuor: A tool for Qualitative and Quantitative Linear Time analysis of Reactive Systems , 2006, Third International Conference on the Quantitative Evaluation of Systems - (QEST'06).