A History of Until

Until is a notoriously difficult temporal operator as it is both existential and universal at the same time: A until B holds at the current time instant w iff either B holds at w or there exists a time instant w' in the future at which B holds and such that A holds in all the time instants between the current one and w'. This "ambivalent" nature poses a significant challenge when attempting to give deduction rules for until. In this paper, in contrast, we make explicit this duality of until to provide well-behaved natural deduction rules for linear-time logics by introducing a new temporal operator that allows us to formalize the "history" of until, i.e., the "internal" universal quantification over the time instants between the current one and w'. This approach provides the basis for formalizing deduction systems for temporal logics endowed with the until operator. For concreteness, we give here a labeled natural deduction system for a linear-time logic endowed with the new operator and show that, via a proper translation, such a system is also sound and complete with respect to the linear temporal logic LTL with until.Comment: 24 pages, full version of paper at Methods for Modalities 2009 (M4M-6

Ockhamist Propositional Dynamic Logic: a natural link between PDL and CTL

International audienceWe present a new logic called Ockhamist Propositional Dynamic Logic, OPDL, which provides a natural link between PDL and CTL*. We show that both PDL and CTL* can be polynomially embedded into OPDL in a rather simple and direct way. More generally, the semantics on which OPDL is based provides a unifying framework for making the dynamic logic family and the temporal logic family converge in a single logical framework. Decidability of the satisfiability problem for OPDL is studied in the paper

Sublogics of a Branching Time Logic of Robustness

In this paper we study sublogics of RoCTL*, a recently proposed logic for specifying robustness. RoCTL* allows specifying robustness in terms of properties that are robust to a certain number of failures. RoCTL* is an extension of the branching time logic CTL* which in turn extends CTL by removing the requirement that temporal operators be paired with path quantifiers. In this paper we consider three sublogics of RoCTL*. We present a tableau for RoBCTL*, a bundled variant of RoCTL* that allows fairness constraints to be placed on allowable paths. We then examine two CTL-like restrictions of CTL*. Pair-RoCTL* requires a temporal operator to be paired with a path quantifier; we show that Pair-RoCTL* is as hard to reason about as the full CTL*. State-RoCTL* is restricted to State formulas, and we show that there is a linear truth preserving translation of State-RoCTL into CTL, allowing State-RoCTL to be reasoned about as efficiently as CTL

Labeled natural deduction for temporal logics

Nonostante la notevole rilevanza delle logiche temporali in molti campi dell'informatica, la loro analisi teorica non è certo da ritenersi conclusa. In particolare, molti sono i punti ancora aperti nell'ambito della teoria della dimostrazione, specialmente se consideriamo le logiche temporali di tipo branching. Il principale contributo di questa tesi consiste nella presentazione di un approccio modulare per la definizione di sistemi di deduzione naturale etichettata per un'ampia gamma di logiche temporali. Viene innanzitutto proposto un sistema per la logica temporale minimale di Prior; si mostra quindi come estenderlo in maniera modulare allo scopo di trattare logiche più complesse, quali ad esempio LTL. Viene infine proposta un'estensione al caso delle logiche branching, concentrando l'attenzione sulle logiche con semantica di tipo Ockhamist e bundled. Per i sistemi proposti, viene condotta una dettagliata analisi dal punto di vista della teoria della dimostrazione. In particolare, nel caso delle logiche del tempo discreto, per le quali si richiedono regole che modellino un principio di induzione, viene definita una procedura di normalizzazione ispirata da quelle dei sistemi per l'Aritmetica di Heyting. Come conseguenza, si ottiene una dimostrazione puramente sintattica della consistenza dei sistemi.Despite the great relevance of temporal logics in many applications of computer science, their theoretical analysis is far from being concluded. In particular, we still lack a satisfactory proof theory for temporal logics and this is especially true in the case of branching-time logics. The main contribution of this thesis consists in presenting a modular approach to the definition of labeled (natural) deduction systems for a large class of temporal logics. We start by proposing a system for the basic Priorean tense logic and show how to modularly enrich it in order to deal with more complex logics, like LTL. We also consider the extension to the branching case, focusing on the Ockhamist branching-time logics with a bundled semantics. A detailed proof-theoretical analysis of the systems is performed. In particular, in the case of discrete-time logics, for which rules modeling an induction principle are required, we define a procedure of normalization inspired to those of systems for Heyting Arithmetic. As a consequence of normalization, we obtain a purely syntactical proof of the consistency of the systems