The Spectrum of Strong Behavioral Equivalences for Nondeterministic and Probabilistic Processes

We present a spectrum of trace-based, testing, and bisimulation equivalences for nondeterministic and probabilistic processes whose activities are all observable. For every equivalence under study, we examine the discriminating power of three variants stemming from three approaches that differ for the way probabilities of events are compared when nondeterministic choices are resolved via deterministic schedulers. We show that the first approach - which compares two resolutions relatively to the probability distributions of all considered events - results in a fragment of the spectrum compatible with the spectrum of behavioral equivalences for fully probabilistic processes. In contrast, the second approach - which compares the probabilities of the events of a resolution with the probabilities of the same events in possibly different resolutions - gives rise to another fragment composed of coarser equivalences that exhibits several analogies with the spectrum of behavioral equivalences for fully nondeterministic processes. Finally, the third approach - which only compares the extremal probabilities of each event stemming from the different resolutions - yields even coarser equivalences that, however, give rise to a hierarchy similar to that stemming from the second approach.Comment: In Proceedings QAPL 2013, arXiv:1306.241

Testing Reactive Probabilistic Processes

We define a testing equivalence in the spirit of De Nicola and Hennessy for reactive probabilistic processes, i.e. for processes where the internal nondeterminism is due to random behaviour. We characterize the testing equivalence in terms of ready-traces. From the characterization it follows that the equivalence is insensitive to the exact moment in time in which an internal probabilistic choice occurs, which is inherent from the original testing equivalence of De Nicola and Hennessy. We also show decidability of the testing equivalence for finite systems for which the complete model may not be known

Equivalences on Phase Type Processes

In this thesis, we introduce Phase Type Processes (PTPs), a novel stochastic modeling approach that can express probabilistic and nondeterministic choices as well as random delays following phase type distributions, a generalization of exponential distributions. Action-labeled transitions are used to react on external stimuli and they are clearly separated from phase type transitions. The semantics of PTPs are defined in terms of path probabilities with respect to schedulers that resolve nondeterministic choices based on the timed process history. The main emphasis of this work is to analyze a variety of notions of equivalence for PTPs and classify them with respect to their distinguishing power. Amongst others, we define bisimulation, trace and testing equivalence as well as extensions of failure trace equivalence. Moreover, the contribution includes a discussion of parallel composition in the context of a partial memoryless property and the examination of a mapping from PTPs to the subclass of single phased processes in which all random delays are exponentially distributed