Future temporal logic needs infinitely many modalities

Kamp’s theorem states that there is a temporal logic with two modalities (“until” and “since”) which is expressively complete for the first-order monadic logic of order over the real line. In this paper we show that there is no temporal logic with finitely many modalities which is expressively complete for the future fragment of first-order monadic logic of order over the real line (a future formula over the real time line is a formula whose truth value at a point is independent of what happened in the past).     

Specifying safety-critical systems with a decidable duration logic

Punctual timing constraints are important in formal modelling of safety-critical real-time systems. But they are very expensive to express in dense time. In most cases, punctuality and dense-time lead to undecidability. Efforts have been successful to obtain decidability; but the results are either non-primitive recursive or nonelementary. In this paper we propose a duration logic which can express quantitative temporal constraints and punctuality timing constraints over continuous intervals and has a reasonable complexity. Our logic allows most specifications that are interesting in practice, and retains punctuality. It can capture the semantics of both events and states, and incorporates the notions duration and accumulation. We call this logic ESDL (the acronym stands for Event- and State-based Duration Logic). We show that the satisfiability problem is decidable, and the complexity of the satisfiability problem is NEXPTIME. ESDL is one of a few decidable interval temporal logics with metric operators. Through some case studies, we also show that ESDL can specify many safety-critical real-time system properties which were previously specified by undecidable interval logics or their decidable reductions based on some abstractions.     

The light side of interval temporal logic: the Bernays-Schönfinkel fragment of CDT

Decidability and complexity of the satisfiability problem for the logics of time intervals have been extensively studied in the recent years. Even though most interval logics turn out to be undecidable, meaningful exceptions exist, such as the logics of temporal neighborhood and (some of) the logics of the subinterval relation. In this paper, we explore a different path to decidability: instead of restricting the set of modalities or imposing severe semantic restrictions, we take the most expressive interval temporal logic studied so far, namely, Venema’s CDT, and we suitably limit the negation depth of modalities. The decidability of the satisfiability problem for the resulting fragment, called CDT_BS, over the class of all linear orders, is proved by embedding it into a well-known decidable quantifier prefix class of first-order logic, namely, Bernays-Schönfinkel class. In addition, we show that CDT_BS is in fact NP-complete (Bernays-Schönfinkel class is NEXPTIME-complete), and we prove its expressive completeness with respect to a suitable fragment of Bernays-Schönfinkel class. Finally, we show that any increase in the negation depth of CDT_BS modalities immediately yields undecidability.     

An Event-Based Fragment of First-Order Logic over Intervals

We consider a new fragment of first-order logic with two variables. This logic is defined over interval structures. It constitutes unary predicates, a binary predicate and a function symbol. Considering such a fragment of first-order logic is motivated by defining a general framework for event-based interval temporal logics. In this paper, we present a sound, complete and terminating decision procedure for this logic. We show that the logic is decidable, and provide a NEXPTIME complexity bound for satisfiability. This result shows that even a simple decidable fragment of first-order logic has NEXPTIME complexity.     

On the complexity of the two-variable guarded fragment with transitive guards

We investigate the complexity of the satisfiability problem for the two-variable guarded fragment with transitive guards. We prove that the satisfiability problem for the monadic version of this logic without equality is 2EXPTIME-hard. It is in fact 2EXPTIME-complete, since as shown by Szwast and Tendera, the whole guarded fragment with transitive guards is in 2EXPTIME. We also introduce a new logic—the guarded fragment with one-way transitive guards and prove that the satisfiability problem for the two-variable version of this logic is EXPSPACE-complete. The two-variable guarded fragment with transitive guards can be seen as a counterpart of some branching temporal logics with both future and past operators, while the two-variable guarded fragment with one-way transitive guards corresponds to some branching temporal logics without past operators. Therefore, our results reveal the difference in the complexity of the reasoning about the future only and both the future and the past, in the two-variable guarded fragment with transitive guards.     

An Optimal Decision Procedure for Right Propositional Neighborhood Logic

Propositional interval temporal logics are quite expressive temporal logics that allow one to naturally express statements that refer to time intervals. Unfortunately, most such logics turn out to be (highly) undecidable. In order to get decidability, severe syntactic or semantic restrictions have been imposed to interval-based temporal logics to reduce them to point-based ones. The problem of identifying expressive enough, yet decidable, new interval logics or fragments of existing ones that are genuinely interval-based is still largely unexplored. In this paper, we focus our attention on interval logics of temporal neighborhood. We address the decision problem for the future fragment of Neighborhood Logic (Right Propositional Neighborhood Logic, RPNL for short), and we positively solve it by showing that the satisfiability problem for RPNL over natural numbers is NEXPTIME-complete. Then, we develop a sound and complete tableau-based decision procedure, and we prove its optimality.     

Temporal logics with incommensurable distances are undecidable

Temporal Logic based on the two modalities “Since” and “Until” (TL) is the most popular logic for the specification of reactive systems. It is often called the linear time temporal logic. However, metric properties of real time cannot be expressed in this logic. The simplest modalities with metric properties are “X will happen within δ units of time”. The extension of TL by all these modalities with rational δ is decidable. We show that the extension of the linear time temporal logic by two modalities “X will happen within one unit of time”, “X will happen within τ unit of time” is undecidable, whenever τ is irrational.     

Undecidability of Multi-modal Hybrid Logics

This paper establishes undecidability of satisfiability for multi-modal logic equipped with the hybrid binder ↓, with respect to frame classes over which the same language with only one modality is decidable. This is in contrast to the usual behaviour of many modal and hybrid logics, whose uni-modal and multi-modal versions do not differ in terms of decidability and, quite often, complexity. The results from this paper apply to a wide range of frame classes including temporally and epistemically relevant ones.     

Multi-Dimensional Modal Logic as a Framework for Spatio-Temporal Reasoning

In this paper we advocate the use of multi-dimensional modal logics as a framework for knowledge representation and, in particular, for representing spatio-temporal information. We construct a two-dimensional logic capable of describing topological relationships that change over time. This logic, called PSTL (Propositional Spatio-Temporal Logic) is the Cartesian product of the well-known temporal logic PTL and the modal logic S4_u, which is the Lewis system S4 augmented with the universal modality. Although it is an open problem whether the full PSTL is decidable, we show that it contains decidable fragments into which various temporal extensions (both point-based and interval based) of the spatial logic RCC-8 can be embedded. We consider known decidability and complexity results that are relevant to computation with multi-dimensional formalisms and discuss possible directions for further research.     

Quantitative temporal logics over the reals: PSpace and below

In many cases, the addition of metric operators to qualitative temporal logics (TLs) increases the complexity of satisfiability by at least one exponential: while common qualitative TLs are complete for NP or PSpace, their metric extensions are often ExpSpace-complete or even undecidable. In this paper, we exhibit several metric extensions of qualitative TLs of the real line that are at most PSpace-complete, and analyze the transition from NP to PSpace for such logics. Our first result is that the logic obtained by extending since-until logic of the real line with the operators ‘sometime within n time units in the past/future’ is still PSpace-complete. In contrast to existing results, we also capture the case where n is coded in binary and the finite variability assumption is not made. To establish containment in PSpace, we use a novel reduction technique that can also be used to prove tight upper complexity bounds for many other metric TLs in which the numerical parameters to metric operators are coded in binary. We then consider metric TLs of the reals that do not offer any qualitative temporal operators. In such languages, the complexity turns out to depend on whether binary or unary coding of parameters is assumed: satisfiability is still PSpace-complete under binary coding, but only NP-complete under unary coding.     

A Temporal Logic for Proving Properties of Topologically General Executions

We present a generalization of the temporal propositional logic of linear time which is useful for stating and proving properties of the generic execution sequence of a parallel program or a non-deterministic program. The formal system we present is exactly that same as the third of three logics presented by Lehmann and Shelah (Information and Control53, 165–198 (1982)), but we give it a different semantics. The models are tree models of arbitrary size similar to those used in branching time temporal logic. The formulation we use allows us to state properties of the “co-meagre” family of paths, where the term “co-meagre” refers to a set whose complement is of the first category in Baire's classification looking at the set of paths in the model as a metric space. Our system is decidable, sound, and, complete for models of arbitrary size, but it has the finite model property; namely, every sentence having a model has a finite model.     

Interval logics and their decision procedures : Part II: a real-time interval logic

In a companion paper, we presented an interval logic, and showed that it is elementarily decidable. In this paper we extend the logic to allow reasoning about real-time properties of concurrent systems; we call this logic real-time future interval logic (RTFIL). We model time by the real numbers, and allow our syntax to state the bounds on the duration of an interval. RTFIL possesses the “real-time interpolation property,” which appears to be the natural quantitative counterpart of invariance under finite stuttering. As the main result of this paper, we show that RTFIL is decidable; the decision algorithm is slightly more expensive than for the untimed logic. Our decidability proof is based on the reduction of the satisfiability problem for the logic to the emptiness problem for timed Büchi automata. The latter problem was shown decidable by Alur and Dill in a landmark paper, in which this real-time extension of ω-automata was introduced. Finally, we consider an extension of the logic that allows intervals to be constructed by means of “real-time offsets”, and show that even this simple extension renders the logic highly undecidable.     

Multi-Agent Dynamic Logics with Informational Test

This paper investigates a family of logics for reasoning about the dynamic activities and informational attitudes of agents, namely the agents' beliefs and knowledge. The logics are based on a new formalisation and semantics of the test operator of propositional dynamic logic and a representation of actions which distinguishes abstract actions from concrete actions. The new test operator, called informational test, can be used to formalise the beliefs and knowledge of particular agents as dynamic modalities. This approach is consistent with the formalisation of the agents' beliefs and knowledge as K(D)45 and S5 modalities. Properties concerning informativeness, truthfulness and preservation of beliefs are proved for a derivative of the informational test operator. It is shown that common belief and common knowledge can be expressed in the considered logics. This means, the logics are more expressive than propositional dynamic logic with an extra modality for belief or knowledge. The logics remain decidable and belong to 2EXPTIME. Versions of the considered logics express natural additional properties of beliefs or knowledge and interaction of beliefs or knowledge with actions. It is shown that a simulation of PDL can be constructed in one of these extensions.     

Describing properties of concurrent systems (Logic for Traces): (invited talk)

Mazurkiewicz traces are one of the simplest non-interleaving model of executions. For some systems the trace model may be exponentially smaller than the transition system model. This is one of the motivations for studying formalisms describing directly the properties of traces. Traces have also very nice theoretical properties. For example, there are characterizations of first-order definable and monadic second order definable (i.e. regular) languages and these characterizations are very similar to the ones in the case of words.Our goal is to find formalism that have the same expressive power as first or monadic-second order logic but that are manageable at the same time (i.e. with satisfiability and model checking problems in PSPACE). In other words, we want to understand what can be LTL and the mu-calculus variants for traces.A temporal logic over trace is called local if the meaning of a formula is a set of positions in the trace. A logic is called global if the meaning of a formula is a set of configurations (finite downwards closed subsets of positions). We will survey the results on both kind of logics. Among global logics it is relatively easy to find an expressively complete formalism but these logics have high complexity. Somewhat surprisingly there exist local expressively complete logics. Unfortunately, the presently known formalisms require some operators that are not completely satisfactory.     

Some Logical and Automata-Theoretic Aspects of Product Behaviours

A network of sequential processes that communicate by synchronizing on common actions enjoys the status of a “folklore” model of distributed systems. Despite (because of?) this familiarity it is only recently there has been a systematic study of this model that we call product systems.In particular, it turns out that the classical theory involving Buechi automata, w-regular languages, monadic second order logics and linear time temporal logics extends smoothly to the setting of product systems. We shall survey this theory with an eye towards partial order based temporal logics.     

Branching-time logics with path relativisation

We define extensions of the full branching-time temporal logic CTL^? in which the path quantifiers are relativised by formal languages of infinite words, and consider its natural fragments obtained by extending the logics CTL and CTL⁺ in the same way. This yields a small and two-dimensional hierarchy of temporal logics parametrised by the class of languages used for the path restriction on one hand, and the use of temporal operators on the other. We motivate the study of such logics through two application scenarios: in abstraction and refinement they offer more precise means for the exclusion of spurious traces; and they may be useful in software synthesis where decidable logics without the finite model property are required. We study the relative expressive power of these logics as well as the complexities of their satisfiability and model-checking problems.     

Decidability of a Hybrid Duration Calculus

We present a logic which we call Hybrid Duration Calculus (HDC). HDC is obtained by adding the following hybrid logical machinery to the Restricted Duration Calculus (RDC): nominals, satisfaction operators, down-arrow binder, and the global modality. RDC is known to be decidable, and in this paper we show that decidability is retained when adding the hybrid logical machinery. Decidability of HDC is shown by reducing the satisfiability problem to satisfiability of Monadic Second-Order Theory of Order. We illustrate the increased expressive power obtained in hybridizing RDC by showing that HDC, in contrast to RDC, can express all of the 13 possible relations between intervals.     

Timer formulas and decidable metric temporal logic

We define a quantitative temporal logic that is based on a simple modality within the framework of monadic predicate logic. Its canonical model is the real line (and not an ω-sequence of some type). It can be interpreted either by behaviors with finite variability or by unrestricted behaviors. For finite variability models it is as expressive as any logic suggested in the literature. For unrestricted behaviors our treatment is new. In both cases we prove decidability and complexity bounds using general theorems from logic (and not from automata theory). The technical proof uses a sublanguage of the metric monadic logic of order, the language of timer normal form formulas. Metric formulas are reduced to timer normal form and timer normal form formulas allow elimination of the metric.     

A polynomial space construction of tree-like models for logics with local chains of modal connectives

The LA-logics (“logics with Local Agreement”) are polymodal logics defined semantically such that at any world of a model, the sets of successors for the different accessibility relations can be linearly ordered and the accessibility relations are equivalence relations. In a previous work, we have shown that every LA-logic defined with a finite set of modal indices has an NP-complete satisfiability problem. In this paper, we introduce a class of LA-logics with a countably infinite set of modal indices and we show that the satisfiability problem is PSPACE-complete for every logic of such a class. The upper bound is shown by exhibiting a tree structure of the models. This allows us to establish a surprising correspondence between the modal depth of formulae and the number of occurrences of distinct modal connectives. More importantly, as a consequence, we can show the PSPACE-completeness of Gargov's logic DALLA and Nakamura's logic LGM restricted to modal indices that are rational numbers, for which the computational complexity characterization has been open until now. These logics are known to belong to the class of information logics and fuzzy modal logics, respectively.     

On the expressiveness of second-order spider diagrams

Existing diagrammatic notations based on Euler diagrams are mostly limited in expressiveness to monadic first-order logic with an order predicate. The most expressive monadic diagrammatic notation is known as spider diagrams of order. A primary contribution of this paper is to develop and formalise a second-order diagrammatic logic, called second-order spider diagrams, extending spider diagrams of order. A motivation for this lies in the limited expressiveness of first-order logics. They are incapable of defining a variety of common properties, like ‘is even’, which are second-order definable. We show that second-order spider diagrams are at least as expressive as monadic second-order logic. This result is proved by giving a method for constructing a second-order spider diagram for any regular expression. Since monadic second-order logic sentences and regular expressions are equivalent in expressive power, this shows second-order spider diagrams can express any sentence of monadic second-order logic.