Continuous-Time Markov Decisions based on Partial Exploration
This work provides a practical speedup technique for verification of continuous-time Markov decision processes, which is important for performance-critical systems.
The authors propose a framework to accelerate time-bounded reachability analysis for continuous-time Markov decision processes by iteratively constructing a small, almost equivalent subsystem from simulations, achieving orders-of-magnitude speedups experimentally.
We provide a framework for speeding up algorithms for time-bounded reachability analysis of continuous-time Markov decision processes. The principle is to find a small, but almost equivalent subsystem of the original system and only analyse the subsystem. Candidates for the subsystem are identified through simulations and iteratively enlarged until runs are represented in the subsystem with high enough probability. The framework is thus dual to that of abstraction refinement. We instantiate the framework in several ways with several traditional algorithms and experimentally confirm orders-of-magnitude speed ups in many cases.