Model Checking Games for the Quantitative mu-Calculus

We investigate quantitative extensions of modal logic and the modal mu-calculus, and study the question whether the tight connection between logic and games can be lifted from the qualitative logics to their quantitative counterparts. It turns out that, if the quantitative mu-calculus is defined in an appropriate way respecting the duality properties between the logical operators, then its model checking problem can indeed be characterised by a quantitative variant of parity games. However, these quantitative games have quite different properties than their classical counterparts, in particular they are, in general, not positionally determined. The correspondence between the logic and the games goes both ways: the value of a formula on a quantitative transition system coincides with the value of the associated quantitative game, and conversely, the values of quantitative parity games are definable in the quantitative mu-calculus

The Variable Hierarchy for the Games mu-Calculus

Parity games are combinatorial representations of closed Boolean mu-terms. By adding to them draw positions, they have been organized by Arnold and one of the authors into a mu-calculus. As done by Berwanger et al. for the propositional modal mu-calculus, it is possible to classify parity games into levels of a hierarchy according to the number of fixed-point variables. We ask whether this hierarchy collapses w.r.t. the standard interpretation of the games mu-calculus into the class of all complete lattices. We answer this question negatively by providing, for each n >= 1, a parity game Gn with these properties: it unravels to a mu-term built up with n fixed-point variables, it is semantically equivalent to no game with strictly less than n-2 fixed-point variables

Probabilistic modal {\mu}-calculus with independent product

The probabilistic modal {\mu}-calculus is a fixed-point logic designed for expressing properties of probabilistic labeled transition systems (PLTS's). Two equivalent semantics have been studied for this logic, both assigning to each state a value in the interval [0,1] representing the probability that the property expressed by the formula holds at the state. One semantics is denotational and the other is a game semantics, specified in terms of two-player stochastic parity games. A shortcoming of the probabilistic modal {\mu}-calculus is the lack of expressiveness required to encode other important temporal logics for PLTS's such as Probabilistic Computation Tree Logic (PCTL). To address this limitation we extend the logic with a new pair of operators: independent product and coproduct. The resulting logic, called probabilistic modal {\mu}-calculus with independent product, can encode many properties of interest and subsumes the qualitative fragment of PCTL. The main contribution of this paper is the definition of an appropriate game semantics for this extended probabilistic {\mu}-calculus. This relies on the definition of a new class of games which generalize standard two-player stochastic (parity) games by allowing a play to be split into concurrent subplays, each continuing their evolution independently. Our main technical result is the equivalence of the two semantics. The proof is carried out in ZFC set theory extended with Martin's Axiom at an uncountable cardinal