A testing scenario for probabilistic automata

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 an intuitive testing scenario. 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 a simple and intuitive testing scenario for probabilistic automata and we prove that the equivalence induced by this scenario coincides with the trace distribution equivalence proposed by Segala. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.