Lumpable continuous-time stochastic automata networks

The generator matrix of a continuous-time stochastic automata network (SAN) is a sum of tensor products of smaller matrices, which may have entries that are functions of the global state space. This paper specifies easy to check conditions for a class of ordinarily lumpable partitionings of the generator of a continuous-time SAN in which aggregation is performed automaton by automaton. When there exists a lumpable partitioning induced by the tensor representation of the generator, it is shown that an efficient aggregation-iterative disaggregation algorithm may be employed to compute the steady-state distribution. The results of experiments with two SAN models show that the proposed algorithm performs better than the highly competitive block Gauss-Seidel in terms of both the number of iterations and the time to converge to the solution. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.