From Fairness to Chance
Luca de Alfaro · Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science · 1999
Fairness is a mathematical abstraction used in the modeling of a wide range of phenomena, including concurrency, scheduling, and probability. In this paper, we study fairness in the context of probabilistic systems, and we introduce probabilistic fairness, a novel notion of fairness that is itself defined in terms of probability. The definition of probabilistic fairness makes it invariant with respect to synchronous composition, and facilitates the design of model-checking algorithms for quantitative properties of probabilistic systems. We compare probabilistic fairness with other notions of fairness for probabilistic systems, and we provide algorithms that solve the verification problem for various classes of probabilistic properties on finite-state systems with fairness.