Computing reachability probabilities is a fundamental problem in the analysis of randomized programs. This article aims at a comprehensive and comparative account of various martingale-based methods for over- and under-approximating reachability probabilities. Based on the existing works that stretch across different communities (formal verification, control theory, etc.), we offer a unifying account. In particular, we emphasize the role of order-theoretic fixed points—a classic topic in computer science—in the analysis of randomized programs. This leads us to two new martingale-based techniques, too. We also make an experimental comparison using our implementation of template-based synthesis algorithms for those martingales.

Computing reachability probabilities is a fundamental problem in the analysis of probabilistic programs. This paper aims at a comprehensive and comparative account of various martingale-based methods for over-and underapproximating reachability probabilities. Based on the existing works that stretch across different communities (formal verification, control theory, etc.), we offer a unifying account. In particular, we emphasize the role of order-theoretic fixed points-a classic topic in computer science-in the analysis of probabilistic programs. This leads us to two new martingale-based techniques, too. We also make an experimental comparison using our implementation of template-based synthesis algorithms for those martingales.

Solving stochastic games with the reachability objective is a fundamental problem, especially in quantitative verification and synthesis. For this purpose, bounded value iteration (BVI) attracts attention as an efficient iterative method. However, BVI's performance is often impeded by costly end component (EC) computation that is needed to ensure convergence. Our contribution is a novel BVI algorithm that conducts, in addition to local propagation by the Bellman update that is typical of BVI, global propagation of upper bounds that is not hindered by ECs. To conduct global propagation in a computationally tractable manner, we construct a weighted graph and solve the widest path problem in it. Our experiments show the algorithm's performance advantage over the previous BVI algorithms that rely on EC computation.

We develop a method to approximate the moments of a discrete-time stochastic polynomial system. Our method is built upon Carleman linearization with truncation. Specifically, we take a stochastic polynomial system with finitely many states and transform it into an infinitedimensional system with linear deterministic dynamics, which describe the exact evolution of the moments of the original polynomial system. We then truncate this deterministic system to obtain a finite-dimensional linear system, and use it for moment approximation by iteratively propagating the moments along the finite-dimensional linear dynamics across time. We provide efficient online computation methods for this propagation scheme with several error bounds for the approximation. Our result also shows that precise values of certain moments can be obtained when the truncated system is sufficiently large. Furthermore, we investigate techniques to reduce the offline computation load using reduced Kronecker power. Based on the obtained approximate moments and their errors, we also provide probability bounds for the state to be outside of given hyperellipsoidal regions. Those bounds allow us to conduct probabilistic safety analysis online through convex optimization. We demonstrate our results on a logistic map with stochastic dynamics and a vehicle dynamics subject to stochastic disturbance.

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