1,412 research outputs found
Reasoning About Strategies: On the Model-Checking Problem
In open systems verification, to formally check for reliability, one needs an
appropriate formalism to model the interaction between agents and express the
correctness of the system no matter how the environment behaves. An important
contribution in this context is given by modal logics for strategic ability, in
the setting of multi-agent games, such as ATL, ATL\star, and the like.
Recently, Chatterjee, Henzinger, and Piterman introduced Strategy Logic, which
we denote here by CHP-SL, with the aim of getting a powerful framework for
reasoning explicitly about strategies. CHP-SL is obtained by using first-order
quantifications over strategies and has been investigated in the very specific
setting of two-agents turned-based games, where a non-elementary model-checking
algorithm has been provided. While CHP-SL is a very expressive logic, we claim
that it does not fully capture the strategic aspects of multi-agent systems. In
this paper, we introduce and study a more general strategy logic, denoted SL,
for reasoning about strategies in multi-agent concurrent games. We prove that
SL includes CHP-SL, while maintaining a decidable model-checking problem. In
particular, the algorithm we propose is computationally not harder than the
best one known for CHP-SL. Moreover, we prove that such a problem for SL is
NonElementarySpace-hard. This negative result has spurred us to investigate
here syntactic fragments of SL, strictly subsuming ATL\star, with the hope of
obtaining an elementary model-checking problem. Among the others, we study the
sublogics SL[NG], SL[BG], and SL[1G]. They encompass formulas in a special
prenex normal form having, respectively, nested temporal goals, Boolean
combinations of goals and, a single goal at a time. About these logics, we
prove that the model-checking problem for SL[1G] is 2ExpTime-complete, thus not
harder than the one for ATL\star
Alternating register automata on finite words and trees
We study alternating register automata on data words and data trees in
relation to logics. A data word (resp. data tree) is a word (resp. tree) whose
every position carries a label from a finite alphabet and a data value from an
infinite domain. We investigate one-way automata with alternating control over
data words or trees, with one register for storing data and comparing them for
equality. This is a continuation of the study started by Demri, Lazic and
Jurdzinski. From the standpoint of register automata models, this work aims at
two objectives: (1) simplifying the existent decidability proofs for the
emptiness problem for alternating register automata; and (2) exhibiting
decidable extensions for these models. From the logical perspective, we show
that (a) in the case of data words, satisfiability of LTL with one register and
quantification over data values is decidable; and (b) the satisfiability
problem for the so-called forward fragment of XPath on XML documents is
decidable, even in the presence of DTDs and even of key constraints. The
decidability is obtained through a reduction to the automata model introduced.
This fragment contains the child, descendant, next-sibling and
following-sibling axes, as well as data equality and inequality tests
Qualitative Analysis of Concurrent Mean-payoff Games
We consider concurrent games played by two-players on a finite-state graph,
where in every round the players simultaneously choose a move, and the current
state along with the joint moves determine the successor state. We study a
fundamental objective, namely, mean-payoff objective, where a reward is
associated to each transition, and the goal of player 1 is to maximize the
long-run average of the rewards, and the objective of player 2 is strictly the
opposite. The path constraint for player 1 could be qualitative, i.e., the
mean-payoff is the maximal reward, or arbitrarily close to it; or quantitative,
i.e., a given threshold between the minimal and maximal reward. We consider the
computation of the almost-sure (resp. positive) winning sets, where player 1
can ensure that the path constraint is satisfied with probability 1 (resp.
positive probability). Our main results for qualitative path constraints are as
follows: (1) we establish qualitative determinacy results that show that for
every state either player 1 has a strategy to ensure almost-sure (resp.
positive) winning against all player-2 strategies, or player 2 has a spoiling
strategy to falsify almost-sure (resp. positive) winning against all player-1
strategies; (2) we present optimal strategy complexity results that precisely
characterize the classes of strategies required for almost-sure and positive
winning for both players; and (3) we present quadratic time algorithms to
compute the almost-sure and the positive winning sets, matching the best known
bound of algorithms for much simpler problems (such as reachability
objectives). For quantitative constraints we show that a polynomial time
solution for the almost-sure or the positive winning set would imply a solution
to a long-standing open problem (the value problem for turn-based deterministic
mean-payoff games) that is not known to be solvable in polynomial time
Near-Optimal Scheduling for LTL with Future Discounting
We study the search problem for optimal schedulers for the linear temporal
logic (LTL) with future discounting. The logic, introduced by Almagor, Boker
and Kupferman, is a quantitative variant of LTL in which an event in the far
future has only discounted contribution to a truth value (that is a real number
in the unit interval [0, 1]). The precise problem we study---it naturally
arises e.g. in search for a scheduler that recovers from an internal error
state as soon as possible---is the following: given a Kripke frame, a formula
and a number in [0, 1] called a margin, find a path of the Kripke frame that is
optimal with respect to the formula up to the prescribed margin (a truly
optimal path may not exist). We present an algorithm for the problem; it works
even in the extended setting with propositional quality operators, a setting
where (threshold) model-checking is known to be undecidable
A Unified Approach to Boundedness Properties in MSO
In the past years, extensions of monadic second-order logic (MSO) that can specify boundedness properties by the use of operators referring to the sizes of sets have been considered. In particular, the logics costMSO introduced by T. Colcombet and MSO+U by M. Bojanczyk were analyzed and connections to automaton models have been established to obtain decision procedures for these logics. In this work, we propose the logic quantitative counting MSO (qcMSO for short), which combines aspects from both costMSO and MSO+U. We show that both logics can be embedded into qcMSO in a natural way. Moreover, we provide a decidability proof for the theory of its weak variant (quantification only over finite sets) for the natural numbers with order and the infinite binary tree. These decidability results are obtained using a regular cost function extension of automatic structures called resource-automatic structures
Optimal Tableaux Method for Constructive Satisfiability Testing and Model Synthesis in the Alternating-time Temporal Logic ATL+
We develop a sound, complete and practically implementable tableaux-based
decision method for constructive satisfiability testing and model synthesis in
the fragment ATL+ of the full Alternating time temporal logic ATL*. The method
extends in an essential way a previously developed tableaux-based decision
method for ATL and works in 2EXPTIME, which is the optimal worst case
complexity of the satisfiability problem for ATL+ . We also discuss how
suitable parametrizations and syntactic restrictions on the class of input ATL+
formulae can reduce the complexity of the satisfiability problem.Comment: 45 page
Good-for-Game QPTL: An Alternating Hodges Semantics
An extension of QPTL is considered where functional dependencies among the
quantified variables can be restricted in such a way that their current values
are independent of the future values of the other variables. This restriction
is tightly connected to the notion of behavioral strategies in game-theory and
allows the resulting logic to naturally express game-theoretic concepts. The
fragment where only restricted quantifications are considered, called
behavioral quantifications, can be decided, for both model checking and
satisfiability, in 2ExpTime and is expressively equivalent to QPTL, though
significantly less succinct
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