LOJul 1, 2019
Parametric Verification: An IntroductionÉtienne André, Michał Knapik, Didier Lime et al.
This paper constitutes a short introduction to parametric verification of concurrent systems. It originates from two 1-day tutorial sessions held at the Petri nets conferences in Toruń (2016) and Zaragoza (2017). The paper presents not only the basic formal concepts tackled in the video version, but also an extensive literature to provide the reader with further references covering the area. We first introduce motivation behind parametric verification in general, and then focus on different models and approaches, for verifying several kinds of systems. They include Parametric Timed Automata, for modelling real-time systems, where the timing constraints are not necessarily known a priori. Similarly, Parametric Interval Markov Chains allow for modelling systems where probabilities of events occurrences are intervals with parametric bounds. Parametric Petri Nets allow for compact representation of systems, and cope with different types of parameters. Finally, Action Synthesis aims at enabling or disabling actions in a concurrent system to guarantee some of its properties. Some tools implementing these approaches were used during hands-on sessions at the tutorial. The corresponding practicals are freely available on the Web.
MADec 8, 2016
Fixpoint Approximation of Strategic Abilities under Imperfect InformationWojciech Jamroga, Michał Knapik, Damian Kurpiewski
Model checking of strategic ability under imperfect information is known to be hard. The complexity results range from NP-completeness to undecidability, depending on the precise setup of the problem. No less importantly, fixpoint equivalences do not generally hold for imperfect information strategies, which seriously hampers incremental synthesis of winning strategies. In this paper, we propose translations of ATLir formulae that provide lower and upper bounds for their truth values, and are cheaper to verify than the original specifications. That is, if the expression is verified as true then the corresponding formula of ATLir should also hold in the given model. We begin by showing where the straightforward approach does not work. Then, we propose how it can be modified to obtain guaranteed lower bounds. To this end, we alter the next-step operator in such a way that traversing one's indistinguishability relation is seen as atomic activity. Most interestingly, the lower approximation is provided by a fixpoint expression that uses a nonstandard variant of the next-step ability operator. We show the correctness of the translations, establish their computational complexity, and validate the approach by experiments with a scalable scenario of Bridge play.