Abstract

Transition systems are well-established as a semantic model for distributed systems with preorders that serve as criteria for refinement of a more abstract transition system to a more concrete one. To reason about probabilistic phenomena such as failure rates, we need to extend models and methods that have proven successful for nonprobabilistic systems to a probabilistic setting. In this paper, we develop a refinement preorder for a probabilistic extension of the transition systems model. The preoder is based on a notion of testing, of testing, where refinement corresponds to an improvement in the "worst-case" behavior of a process. The main of the paper result is that this preorder can be described by a notion of probabilistic simulation, which generalizes the standard simulation preorder for ordinary transition system.

Citations