In this chapter, we will describe, in a tutorial style, recent work on the use of fluid approximation techniques in the context of stochastic model checking. We will discuss the theoretical background and the algorithms working out an example.
This approach is designed for population models, in which a (large) number of individual agents interact, which give rise to continuous time Markov chain (CTMC) models with a very large state space. We then focus on properties of individual agents in the system, specified by Continuous Stochastic Logic (CSL) formulae, and use fluid approximation techniques (specifically, the so called fast simulation) to check those properties. We will show that verification of such CSL formulae reduces to the computation of reachability probabilities in a special kind of time-inhomogeneous CTMC with a small state space, in which both the rates and the structure of the CTMC can change (discontinuously) with time. In this tutorial, we will discuss only briefly the theoretical issues behind the approach, like the decidability of the method and the consistency of the approximation scheme.
