Measure-adaptive state-space construction

Measure-adaptive state-space construction is the process of exploiting symmetry in high-level model and performance measure specifications to automatically construct reduced state-space Markov models that support the evaluation of the performance measure. This paper describes a new reward variable specification technique, which, combined with recently developed state-space construction techniques, will allow us to build tools capable of measure-adaptive state-space construction. That is, these tools will automatically adapt the size of the state space to constraints derived from the system model and the user-specified reward variables. The work described in this paper extends previous work in two directions. First, standard reward variable definitions are extended to allow symmetry in the reward variable to be identified and exploited. Then, symmetric reward variables are further extended to include the set of path-based reward variables described in earlier work. In addition to the theory, several examples are introduced to demonstrate these new techniques.