Approximate Simulations for Task-Structured Probabilistic I/O Automata

A Probabilistic I/O Automaton (PIOA) is a countable-state automaton model that allows nondeterministic and probabilistic choices in state transitions. A task-PIOA adds a task structure on the locally controlled actions of a PIOA as a means for restricting the nondeterminism in the model. The task-PIOA framework defines exact implementation relations based on inclusion of sets of trace distributions. In this paper we develop the theory of approximate implementations and equivalences for task-PIOAs. We propose a new kind of approximate simulation between task-PIOAs and prove that it is sound with respect to approximate implementations. Our notion of similarity of traces is based on a metric on trace distributions and therefore, we do not require the state spaces nor the space of external actions (output alphabet) of the underlying automata to be metric spaces. We discuss applications of approximate implementations to probabilistic safety verification.