On decidability and tractability of querying in temporal EL

We study access to temporal data with TEL, a temporal extension of the tractable description logic EL. Our aim is to establish a clear computational complexity landscape for the atomic query answering problem, in terms of both data and combined complexity. Atomic queries in full TEL turn out to be undecidable even in data complexity. Motivated by the negative result, we identify well-behaved yet expressive fragments of TEL. Our main contributions are a semantic and sufficient syntactic conditions for decidability and three orthogonal tractable fragments, which are based on restricted use of rigid roles, temporal operators, and novel acyclicity conditions on the ontologies

Satisfiability and Model Checking for the Logic of Sub-Intervals under the Homogeneity Assumption

The expressive power of interval temporal logics (ITLs) makes them really fascinating, and one of the most natural choices as specification and planning language. However, for a long time, due to their high computational complexity, they were considered not suitable for practical purposes. The recent discovery of several computationally well-behaved ITLs has finally changed the scenario. In this paper, we investigate the finite satisfiability and model checking problems for the ITL D featuring the sub-interval relation, under the homogeneity assumption (that constrains a proposition letter to hold over an interval if and only if it holds over all its points). First we prove that the satisfiability problem for D, over finite linear orders, is PSPACE-complete; then we show that its model checking problem, over finite Kripke structures, is PSPACE-complete as well. The paper enrich the set of tractable interval temporal logics with a meaningful representative.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1901.0388

Which Fragments of the Interval Temporal Logic HS are Tractable in Model Checking?

Since the 80s, model checking (MC) has been applied to the automatic verification of hardware/software systems. Point-based temporal logics, such as LTL, CTL, CTL⁎, and the like, are commonly used in MC as the specification language; however, there are some inherently interval-based properties of computations, e.g., temporal aggregations and durations, that cannot be properly dealt with by these logics, as they model a state-by-state evolution of systems. Recently, an MC framework for the verification of interval-based properties of computations, based on Halpern and Shoham's interval temporal logic (HS, for short) and its fragments, has been proposed and systematically investigated. In this paper, we focus on the boundaries that separate tractable and intractable HS fragments in MC. We first prove that MC for the logic BE of Allen's relations started-by and finished-by is provably intractable, being EXPSPACE-hard. Such a lower bound immediately propagates to full HS. Then, in contrast, we show that other noteworthy HS fragments, i.e., the logic AA‾BB‾ (resp., AA‾EE‾) of Allen's relations meets, met-by, starts (resp., finishes), and started-by (resp., finished-by), are well-behaved, and turn out to have the same complexity as LTL (PSPACE-complete). Halfway are the fragments AA‾BB‾E‾ and AA‾EB‾E‾, whose EXPSPACE membership and PSPACE hardness are already known. Here, we give an original proof of EXPSPACE membership, that substantially simplifies the complexity of the constructions previously used for such a result. Contraction techniques—suitably tailored to each HS fragment—are at the heart of our results, enabling us to prove a pair of remarkable small-model propertie

Regular Trace Event Structures

We propose trace event structures as a starting point for constructing effective branching time temporal logics in a non-interleaved setting. As a first step towards achieving this goal, we define the notion of a regular trace event structure. We then provide some simple characterizations of this notion of regularity both in terms of recognizable trace languages and in terms of finite 1-safe Petri nets

A Quantitative Extension of Interval Temporal Logic over Infinite Words

Model checking (MC) for Halpern and Shoham’s interval temporal logic HS has been recently investigated in a systematic way, and it is known to be decidable under three distinct semantics (state-based, trace-based and tree-based semantics), all of them assuming homogeneity in the propositional valuation. Here, we focus on the trace-based semantics, where the main semantic entities are the infinite execution paths (traces) of the given Kripke structure. We introduce a quantitative extension of HS over traces, called Difference HS (DHS), allowing one to express timing constraints on the difference among interval lengths (durations). We show that MC and satisfiability of full DHS are in general undecidable, so, we investigate the decidability border for these problems by considering natural syntactical fragments of DHS. In particular, we identify a maximal decidable fragment DHSsimple of DHS proving in addition that the considered problems for this fragment are at least 2Expspace-hard. Moreover, by exploiting new results on linear-time hybrid logics, we show that for an equally expressive fragment of DHSsimple, the problems are Expspace-complete. Finally, we provide a characterization of HS over traces by means of the one-variable fragment of a novel hybrid logic