Bisimulations for fuzzy transition systems revisited

Bisimulation is a well-known behavioral equivalence for discrete event systems, and has recently been adopted and developed in fuzzy systems. In this paper, we propose a new bisimulation, i.e., the group-by-group fuzzy bisimulation, for fuzzy transition systems. It relaxes the fully matching requirement of the bisimulation definition proposed by Cao et al. (2010) [2], and can equate more pairs of states which are deemed to be equivalent intuitively, but which cannot be equated in previous definitions. We carry out a systematic investigation on this new notion of bisimulation. In particular, a fixed point characterization of the group-by-group fuzzy bisimilarity is given, based on which, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm to check whether two states in a fuzzy transition system are group-by-group fuzzy bisimilar. Moreover, a modal logic, which is an extension of the Hennessy-Milner logic, is presented to completely characterize the group-by-group fuzzy bisimilarity. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.