Revisiting Weak Simulation for Substochastic Markov Chains

The spectrum of branching-time relations for probabilistic systems has been investigated thoroughly by Baier, Hermanns, Katoen and Wolf (2003, 2005), including weak simulation for systems involving substochastic distributions. Weak simulation was proven to be sound w. r. t. the liveness fragment of the logic PCTL\X , and its completeness was conjectured. We revisit this result and show that soundness does not hold in general, but only for Markov chains without divergence. It is refuted for some systems with substochastic distributions. Moreover, we provide a counterexample to completeness. In this paper, we present a novel definition that is sound for live PCTL\X , and a variant that is both sound and complete. This technical report is an extended version of [11].