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Synthesis for PCTL in Parametric Markov Decision Processes

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NASA Formal Methods (NFM 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 6617))

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Abstract

In parametric Markov decision processes (PMDPs), transition probabilities are not fixed, but are given as functions over a set of parameters. A PMDP denotes a family of concrete MDPs. This paper studies the synthesis problem for PCTL in PMDPs: Given a specification Φ in PCTL, we synthesise the parameter valuations under which Φ is true. First, we divide the possible parameter space into hyper-rectangles. We use existing decision procedures to check whether Φ holds on each of the Markov processes represented by the hyper-rectangle. As it is normally impossible to cover the whole parameter space by hyper-rectangles, we allow a limited area to remain undecided. We also consider an extension of PCTL with reachability rewards. To demonstrate the applicability of the approach, we apply our technique on a case study, using a preliminary implementation.

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Hahn, E.M., Han, T., Zhang, L. (2011). Synthesis for PCTL in Parametric Markov Decision Processes. In: Bobaru, M., Havelund, K., Holzmann, G.J., Joshi, R. (eds) NASA Formal Methods. NFM 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6617. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20398-5_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20398-5_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20397-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20398-5

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