Confluence Reduction for Markov Automata

Abstract. Markov automata are a novel formalism for specifying sys-tems exhibiting nondeterminism, probabilistic choices and Markovian rates. Recently, the process algebra MAPA was introduced to efficiently model such systems. As always, the state space explosion threatens the analysability of the models generated by such specifications. We there-fore introduce confluence reduction for Markov automata, a powerful reduction technique to keep these models small. We define the notion of confluence directly on Markov automata, and discuss how to syntacti-cally detect confluence on the MAPA language as well. That way, Markov automata generated by MAPA specifications can be reduced on-the-fly while preserving divergence-sensitive branching bisimulation. Three case studies demonstrate the significance of our approach, with reductions in analysis time up to an order of magnitude.