Certificates and Witnesses for Multi-objective Queries in Markov Decision Processes

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Abstract

Certifying verification algorithms not only return whether a given property holds or not, but also provide an accompanying independently checkable certificate and a corresponding witness. The certificate can be used to easily validate the correctness of the result and the witness provides useful diagnostic information, e.g. for debugging purposes. Thus, certificates and witnesses substantially increase the trustworthiness and understandability of the verification process. In this work, we consider certificates and witnesses for multi-objective reachability-invariant and mean-payoff queries in Markov decision processes, that is conjunctions or disjunctions either of reachability and invariant or mean-payoff predicates, both universally and existentially quantified. Thereby, we generalize previous works on certificates and witnesses for single reachability and invariant constraints. To this end, we turn known linear programming techniques into certifying algorithms and show that witnesses in the form of schedulers and subsystems can be obtained. As a proof-of-concept, we report on implementations of certifying verification algorithms and experimental results.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationQuantitative Evaluation of Systems and Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems
EditorsJane Hillston, Sadegh Soudjani, Masaki Waga
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherSpringer Nature Switzerland
Pages1-18
Number of pages18
ISBN (electronic)978-3-031-68416-6
ISBN (print)978-3-031-68415-9
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science
Volume14996
ISSN0302-9743

Conference

Title1st International Joint Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems & Formal Modeling and Analysis of Timed Systems
Abbreviated titleQEST+FORMATS 2024
Descriptionpart of the CONFEST 2024 conference
Duration9 - 13 September 2024
Website
Degree of recognitionInternational event
LocationBest Western Plus Village Park Inn
CityCalgary
CountryCanada

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0002-5321-9343/work/166762363
ORCID /0000-0003-1724-2586/work/166763922
ORCID /0000-0002-3437-0240/work/166765375

Keywords

Keywords

  • Certificates, Markov cecision processes, multi-objective queries