In this paper we introduce a new class of labelled transition systems - Labelled Markov Processes - and define bisimulation for them.

This paper gives a logical characterization of probabilistic bisimulation for Markov processes introduced in [BDEP97]. The thrust of that work was an extension of the notion of bisimulation to systems with continuous state spaces; for example for systems where the state space is the real numbers. In the present paper we study the logical characterization of probabilistic bisimulation for such general systems. This study revealed some unexpected results even for discrete probabilistic systems. ffl Bisimulation can be characterized by a very weak modal logic. The most striking feature is that one has no negation or any kind of negative proposition. ffl Bisimulation can be characterized by several inequivalent logics; we report five in this paper. ffl We do not need any finite branching assumption yet there is no need of infinitary conjunction. ffl The proofs that we give are of an entirely different character than the typical proofs of these results. They use quite subtle facts abou...

Markov processes with continuous state spaces arise in the analysis of stochastic physical systems or stochastic hybrid systems. The standard logical and algorithmic tools for reasoning about discrete (finite-state) systems are, of course, inadequate for reasoning about such systems. In this work we develop three related ideas for making such reasoning principles applicable to continuous systems. ffl We show how to approximate continuous systems by a countable family of finite-state probabilistic systems, we can reconstruct the full system from these finite approximants, ffl we define a metric between processes and show that the approximants converge in this metric to the full process, ffl we show that reasoning about properties definable in a rich logic can be carried out in terms of the approximants. The systems that we consider are Markov processes where the state space is continuous but the time steps are discrete. We allow such processes to interact with the environment by syn...