The Odds of Staying on Budget

Abstract: Given Markov chains and Markov decision processes (MDPs) whose transitions are labelled with non-negative integer costs, we study the computational complexity of deciding whether the probability of paths whose accumulated cost satisfies a Boolean combination of inequalities exceeds a given threshold. For acyclic Markov chains, we show that this problem is PP-complete, whereas it is hard for the PosSLP problem and in PSPACE for general Markov chains. Moreover, for acyclic and general MDPs, we prove PSPACE- and EXP-completeness, respectively. Our results have direct implications on the complexity of computing reward quantiles in succinctly represented stochastic systems.