Constructing Witnesses for Lower Bounds on Behavioural Distances

Abstract: Apartness of states in transition systems has seen growing interest recently as an inductive counterpart to many well-established bisimilarity notions. The constructive nature of apartness allows the definition of derivation systems for reasoning about apartness of states. It further corresponds closely to distinguishing formulas in suitable modal logics. Both the derivations and distinguishing formulas provide (finite) evidence for differences in the behaviour of states. The current paper provides a derivation system in the setting of behavioural distances on labelled Markov chains. Rather than showing pairs of states apart, the system allows the derivation of lower bounds on their distance, complementing existing work giving upper bounds. We further show the soundness and (approximate) completeness of the system with respect to the behavioural distance. We go on to give a constructive correspondence between our derivation system and formulas in a modal logic with quantitative semantics. This logic was used in recent work of Rady and van Breugel to construct evidence for lower bounds on behavioural distances. Our constructions will provide smaller witnessing formulas in many examples.