Stuttering mostly speeds up solving parity games

Abstract

We study the process theoretic notion of stuttering equivalence in the setting of parity games. We demonstrate that stuttering equivalent vertices have the same winner in the parity game. This means that solving a parity game can be accelerated by minimising the game graph with respect to stuttering equivalence. While, at the outset, it might not be clear that this strategy should pay off, our experiments using typical verification problems illustrate that stuttering equivalence speeds up solving parity games in many cases. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.