Abstract

Recently, a large number of equivalences for probabilistic automata has been proposed in the literature. Except for the probabilistic bisimulation of Larsen & Skou, none of these equivalences has been characterized in terms of intuitive testing scenarios. In our view, this is an undesirable situation: in the end, the behavior of an automaton is what an external observer perceives. In this paper, we propose and study a simple and intuitive testing scenario for probabilistic automata. We prove that the equivalence induced by this scenario coincides with the trace distribution equivalence proposed by Segala. A technical result that we need to establish on the way is an Approximation Induction Principle (AIP) for probabilistic processes.

Citations