Incremental quantitative verification for Markov decision processes

Quantitative verification techniques provide an effective means of computing performance and reliability properties for a wide range of systems. However, the computation required can be expensive, particularly if it has to be performed multiple times, for example to determine optimal system parameters. We present efficient incremental techniques for quantitative verification of Markov decision processes, which are able to re-use results from previous verification runs, based on a decomposition of the model into its strongly connected components (SCCs). We also show how this SCC-based approach can be further optimised to improve verification speed and how it can be combined with symbolic data structures to offer better scalability. We illustrate the effectiveness of the approach on a selection of large case studies.