On Termination for Faulty Channel Machines

A channel machine consists of a finite controller together with several fifo channels; the controller can read messages from the head of a channel and write messages to the tail of a channel. In this paper, we focus on channel machines with insertion errors, i.e., machines in whose channels messages can spontaneously appear. Such devices have been previously introduced in the study of Metric Temporal Logic. We consider the termination problem: are all the computations of a given insertion channel machine finite? We show that this problem has non-elementary, yet primitive recursive complexity

MTL-Model Checking of One-Clock Parametric Timed Automata is Undecidable

Parametric timed automata extend timed automata (Alur and Dill, 1991) in that they allow the specification of parametric bounds on the clock values. Since their introduction in 1993 by Alur, Henzinger, and Vardi, it is known that the emptiness problem for parametric timed automata with one clock is decidable, whereas it is undecidable if the automaton uses three or more parametric clocks. The problem is open for parametric timed automata with two parametric clocks. Metric temporal logic, MTL for short, is a widely used specification language for real-time systems. MTL-model checking of timed automata is decidable, no matter how many clocks are used in the timed automaton. In this paper, we prove that MTL-model checking for parametric timed automata is undecidable, even if the automaton uses only one clock and one parameter and is deterministic.Comment: In Proceedings SynCoP 2014, arXiv:1403.784

Complexity Hierarchies Beyond Elementary

We introduce a hierarchy of fast-growing complexity classes and show its suitability for completeness statements of many non elementary problems. This hierarchy allows the classification of many decision problems with a non-elementary complexity, which occur naturally in logic, combinatorics, formal languages, verification, etc., with complexities ranging from simple towers of exponentials to Ackermannian and beyond.Comment: Version 3 is the published version in TOCT 8(1:3), 2016. I will keep updating the catalogue of problems from Section 6 in future revision

On the decidability and complexity of Metric Temporal Logic over finite words

Metric Temporal Logic (MTL) is a prominent specification formalism for real-time systems. In this paper, we show that the satisfiability problem for MTL over finite timed words is decidable, with non-primitive recursive complexity. We also consider the model-checking problem for MTL: whether all words accepted by a given Alur-Dill timed automaton satisfy a given MTL formula. We show that this problem is decidable over finite words. Over infinite words, we show that model checking the safety fragment of MTL--which includes invariance and time-bounded response properties--is also decidable. These results are quite surprising in that they contradict various claims to the contrary that have appeared in the literature

Path Checking for MTL and TPTL over Data Words

Metric temporal logic (MTL) and timed propositional temporal logic (TPTL) are quantitative extensions of linear temporal logic, which are prominent and widely used in the verification of real-timed systems. It was recently shown that the path checking problem for MTL, when evaluated over finite timed words, is in the parallel complexity class NC. In this paper, we derive precise complexity results for the path-checking problem for MTL and TPTL when evaluated over infinite data words over the non-negative integers. Such words may be seen as the behaviours of one-counter machines. For this setting, we give a complete analysis of the complexity of the path-checking problem depending on the number of register variables and the encoding of constraint numbers (unary or binary). As the two main results, we prove that the path-checking problem for MTL is P-complete, whereas the path-checking problem for TPTL is PSPACE-complete. The results yield the precise complexity of model checking deterministic one-counter machines against formulae of MTL and TPTL

The decision problem of modal product logics with a diagonal, and faulty counter machines

In the propositional modal (and algebraic) treatment of two-variable first-order logic equality is modelled by a `diagonal' constant, interpreted in square products of universal frames as the identity (also known as the `diagonal') relation. Here we study the decision problem of products of two arbitrary modal logics equipped with such a diagonal. As the presence or absence of equality in two-variable first-order logic does not influence the complexity of its satisfiability problem, one might expect that adding a diagonal to product logics in general is similarly harmless. We show that this is far from being the case, and there can be quite a big jump in complexity, even from decidable to the highly undecidable. Our undecidable logics can also be viewed as new fragments of first- order logic where adding equality changes a decidable fragment to undecidable. We prove our results by a novel application of counter machine problems. While our formalism apparently cannot force reliable counter machine computations directly, the presence of a unique diagonal in the models makes it possible to encode both lossy and insertion-error computations, for the same sequence of instructions. We show that, given such a pair of faulty computations, it is then possible to reconstruct a reliable run from them

Verification for Timed Automata extended with Unbounded Discrete Data Structures

We study decidability of verification problems for timed automata extended with unbounded discrete data structures. More detailed, we extend timed automata with a pushdown stack. In this way, we obtain a strong model that may for instance be used to model real-time programs with procedure calls. It is long known that the reachability problem for this model is decidable. The goal of this paper is to identify subclasses of timed pushdown automata for which the language inclusion problem and related problems are decidable