Towards a Classification of Behavioural Equivalences in Continuous-time Markov Processes

Abstract

Bisimulation is a concept that captures behavioural equivalence of states in a transition system. In [Linan Chen, Florence Clerc, and Prakash Panangaden, Bisimulation for feller-dynkin processes, in: Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth Conference on the Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics, Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science 347 (2019) 45–63.], we proposed two equivalent definitions of bisimulation on continuous-time stochastic processes where the evolution is a flow through time. In the present paper, we develop the theory further: we introduce different concepts that correspond to different behavioural equivalences and compare them to bisimulation. In particular, we study the relation between bisimulation and symmetry groups of the dynamics. We also provide a game interpretation for two of the behavioural equivalences. We then compare those notions to their discrete-time analogues.