The Tail-Recursive Fragment of Timed Recursive CTL

Timed Recursive CTL (TRCTL) was recently proposed as a merger of two extensions of the well-known branching-time logic CTL: Timed CTL on one hand is interpreted over real-time systems like timed automata, and Recursive CTL (RecCTL) on the other hand obtains high expressiveness through the introduction of a recursion operator. Model checking for the resulting logic is known to be 2-EXPTIME-complete. The aim of this paper is to investigate the possibility to obtain a fragment of lower complexity without losing too much expressive power. It is obtained by a syntactic property called "tail-recursiveness" that restricts the way that recursive formulas can be built. This restriction is known to decrease the complexity of model checking by half an exponential in the untimed setting. We show that this also works in the real-time world: model checking for the tail-recursive fragment of TRCTL is EXPSPACE-complete. The upper bound is obtained by a standard untiming construction via region graphs, and rests on the known complexity of tail-recursive fragments of higher-order modal logics. The lower bound is established by a reduction from a suitable tiling problem

Structural operational semantics for stochastic and weighted transition systems

We introduce weighted GSOS, a general syntactic framework to specify well-behaved transition systems where transitions are equipped with weights coming from a commutative monoid. We prove that weighted bisimilarity is a congruence on systems defined by weighted GSOS specifications. We illustrate the flexibility of the framework by instantiating it to handle some special cases, most notably that of stochastic transition systems. Through examples we provide weighted-GSOS definitions for common stochastic operators in the literature

Toward Structured Proofs for Dynamic Logics

We present Kaisar, a structured interactive proof language for differential dynamic logic (dL), for safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS). The defining feature of Kaisar is *nominal terms*, which simplify CPS proofs by making the frequently needed historical references to past program states first-class. To support nominals, we extend the notion of structured proof with a first-class notion of *structured symbolic execution* of CPS models. We implement Kaisar in the theorem prover KeYmaera X and reproduce an example on the safe operation of a parachute and a case study on ground robot control. We show how nominals simplify common CPS reasoning tasks when combined with other features of structured proof. We develop an extensive metatheory for Kaisar. In addition to soundness and completeness, we show a formal specification for Kaisar's nominals and relate Kaisar to a nominal variant of dL

Toward Specification-Guided Active Mars Exploration for Cooperative Robot Teams

As a step towards achieving autonomy in space exploration missions, we consider a cooperative robotics system consisting of a copter and a rover. The goal of the copter is to explore an unknown environment so as to maximize knowledge about a science mission expressed in linear temporal logic that is to be executed by the rover. We model environmental uncertainty as a belief space Markov decision process and formulate the problem as a two-step stochastic dynamic program that we solve in a way that leverages the decomposed nature of the overall system. We demonstrate in simulations that the robot team makes intelligent decisions in the face of uncertainty