Recurrence and Transience for Probabilistic Automata

In a context of w-regular specifications for infinite execution sequences, the classical Buchi condition, or repeated liveness condition, asks that an accepting state is visited infinitely often. In this paper, we show that in a probabilistic context it is relevant to strengthen this infinitely often condition. An execution path is now accepting if the proportion of time spent on an accepting state does not go to zero as the length of the path goes to infinity. We introduce associated notions of recurrence and transience for non-homogeneous finite Markov chains and study the computational complexity of the associated problems. As Probabilistic Buchi Automata (PBA) have been an attempt to generalize Buchi automata to a probabilistic context, we define a class of Constrained Probabilistic Automata with our new accepting condition on runs. The accepted language is defined by the requirement that the measure of the set of accepting runs is positive (probable semantics) or equals 1 (almost-sure semantics). In contrast to the PBA case, we prove that the emptiness problem for the language of a constrained probabilistic Buchi automaton with the probable semantics is decidable.