Magnifying Lens Abstraction for Stochastic Games with Discounted and Long-run Average Objectives

Turn-based stochastic games and its important subclass Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide models for systems with both probabilistic and nondeterministic behaviors. We consider turn-based stochastic games with two classical quantitative objectives: discounted-sum and long-run average objectives. The game models and the quantitative objectives are widely used in probabilistic verification, planning, optimal inventory control, network protocol and performance analysis. Games and MDPs that model realistic systems often have very large state spaces, and probabilistic abstraction techniques are necessary to handle the state-space explosion. The commonly used full-abstraction techniques do not yield space-savings for systems that have many states with similar value, but does not necessarily have similar transition structure. A semi-abstraction technique, namely Magnifying-lens abstractions (MLA), that clusters states based on value only, disregarding differences in their transition relation was proposed for qualitative objectives (reachability and safety objectives). In this paper we extend the MLA technique to solve stochastic games with discounted-sum and long-run average objectives. We present the MLA technique based abstraction-refinement algorithm for stochastic games and MDPs with discounted-sum objectives. For long-run average objectives, our solution works for all MDPs and a sub-class of stochastic games where every state has the same value

Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs

Non-Zero Sum Games for Reactive Synthesis

In this invited contribution, we summarize new solution concepts useful for the synthesis of reactive systems that we have introduced in several recent publications. These solution concepts are developed in the context of non-zero sum games played on graphs. They are part of the contributions obtained in the inVEST project funded by the European Research Council.Comment: LATA'16 invited pape

Expectations or Guarantees? I Want It All! A crossroad between games and MDPs

When reasoning about the strategic capabilities of an agent, it is important to consider the nature of its adversaries. In the particular context of controller synthesis for quantitative specifications, the usual problem is to devise a strategy for a reactive system which yields some desired performance, taking into account the possible impact of the environment of the system. There are at least two ways to look at this environment. In the classical analysis of two-player quantitative games, the environment is purely antagonistic and the problem is to provide strict performance guarantees. In Markov decision processes, the environment is seen as purely stochastic: the aim is then to optimize the expected payoff, with no guarantee on individual outcomes. In this expository work, we report on recent results introducing the beyond worst-case synthesis problem, which is to construct strategies that guarantee some quantitative requirement in the worst-case while providing an higher expected value against a particular stochastic model of the environment given as input. This problem is relevant to produce system controllers that provide nice expected performance in the everyday situation while ensuring a strict (but relaxed) performance threshold even in the event of very bad (while unlikely) circumstances. It has been studied for both the mean-payoff and the shortest path quantitative measures.Comment: In Proceedings SR 2014, arXiv:1404.041

Qualitative Analysis of Partially-observable Markov Decision Processes

We study observation-based strategies for partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with omega-regular objectives. An observation-based strategy relies on partial information about the history of a play, namely, on the past sequence of observations. We consider the qualitative analysis problem: given a POMDP with an omega-regular objective, whether there is an observation-based strategy to achieve the objective with probability~1 (almost-sure winning), or with positive probability (positive winning). Our main results are twofold. First, we present a complete picture of the computational complexity of the qualitative analysis of POMDP s with parity objectives (a canonical form to express omega-regular objectives) and its subclasses. Our contribution consists in establishing several upper and lower bounds that were not known in literature. Second, we present optimal bounds (matching upper and lower bounds) on the memory required by pure and randomized observation-based strategies for the qualitative analysis of POMDP s with parity objectives and its subclasses

One-Counter Stochastic Games

We study the computational complexity of basic decision problems for one-counter simple stochastic games (OC-SSGs), under various objectives. OC-SSGs are 2-player turn-based stochastic games played on the transition graph of classic one-counter automata. We study primarily the termination objective, where the goal of one player is to maximize the probability of reaching counter value 0, while the other player wishes to avoid this. Partly motivated by the goal of understanding termination objectives, we also study certain "limit" and "long run average" reward objectives that are closely related to some well-studied objectives for stochastic games with rewards. Examples of problems we address include: does player 1 have a strategy to ensure that the counter eventually hits 0, i.e., terminates, almost surely, regardless of what player 2 does? Or that the liminf (or limsup) counter value equals infinity with a desired probability? Or that the long run average reward is >0 with desired probability? We show that the qualitative termination problem for OC-SSGs is in NP intersection coNP, and is in P-time for 1-player OC-SSGs, or equivalently for one-counter Markov Decision Processes (OC-MDPs). Moreover, we show that quantitative limit problems for OC-SSGs are in NP intersection coNP, and are in P-time for 1-player OC-MDPs. Both qualitative limit problems and qualitative termination problems for OC-SSGs are already at least as hard as Condon's quantitative decision problem for finite-state SSGs.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figure. This is a full version of a paper accepted for publication in proceedings of FSTTCS 201

Minimizing Expected Cost Under Hard Boolean Constraints, with Applications to Quantitative Synthesis

In Boolean synthesis, we are given an LTL specification, and the goal is to construct a transducer that realizes it against an adversarial environment. Often, a specification contains both Boolean requirements that should be satisfied against an adversarial environment, and multi-valued components that refer to the quality of the satisfaction and whose expected cost we would like to minimize with respect to a probabilistic environment. In this work we study, for the first time, mean-payoff games in which the system aims at minimizing the expected cost against a probabilistic environment, while surely satisfying an $\omega$-regular condition against an adversarial environment. We consider the case the $\omega$-regular condition is given as a parity objective or by an LTL formula. We show that in general, optimal strategies need not exist, and moreover, the limit value cannot be approximated by finite-memory strategies. We thus focus on computing the limit-value, and give tight complexity bounds for synthesizing $\epsilon$-optimal strategies for both finite-memory and infinite-memory strategies. We show that our game naturally arises in various contexts of synthesis with Boolean and multi-valued objectives. Beyond direct applications, in synthesis with costs and rewards to certain behaviors, it allows us to compute the minimal sensing cost of $\omega$-regular specifications -- a measure of quality in which we look for a transducer that minimizes the expected number of signals that are read from the input