Quantitative fair simulation games

Abstract

Simulation is an attractive alternative to language inclusion for automata as it is an under-approximation of language inclusion, but usually has much lower complexity. Simulation has also been extended in two orthogonal directions, namely, (1) fair simulation, for simulation over specified set of infinite runs; and (2) quantitative simulation, for simulation between weighted automata. While fair trace inclusion is PSPACE-complete, fair simulation can be computed in polynomial time. For weighted automata, the (quantitative) language inclusion problem is undecidable in general, whereas the (quantitative) simulation reduces to quantitative games, which admit pseudo-polynomial time algorithms.In this work, we study (quantitative) simulation for weighted automata with Büchi acceptance conditions, i.e., we generalize fair simulation from non-weighted automata to weighted automata. We show that imposing Büchi acceptance conditions on weighted automata changes many fundamental properties of the simulation games, yet they still admit pseudo-polynomial time algorithms.