Real-time and Probabilistic Temporal Logics: An Overview

Over the last two decades, there has been an extensive study on logical formalisms for specifying and verifying real-time systems. Temporal logics have been an important research subject within this direction. Although numerous logics have been introduced for the formal specification of real-time and complex systems, an up to date comprehensive analysis of these logics does not exist in the literature. In this paper we analyse real-time and probabilistic temporal logics which have been widely used in this field. We extrapolate the notions of decidability, axiomatizability, expressiveness, model checking, etc. for each logic analysed. We also provide a comparison of features of the temporal logics discussed

Non-constructive interval simulation of dynamic systems

Publisher PD

Modular Construction of Complete Coalgebraic Logics

We present a modular approach to defining logics for a wide variety of state-based systems. The systems are modelled by coalgebras, and we use modal logics to specify their observable properties. We show that the syntax, semantics and proof systems associated to such logics can all be derived in a modular fashion. Moreover, we show that the logics thus obtained inherit soundness, completeness and expressiveness properties from their building blocks. We apply these techniques to derive sound, complete and expressive logics for a wide variety of probabilistic systems, for which no complete axiomatisation has been obtained so far

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

Modal Logics of Topological Relations

Logical formalisms for reasoning about relations between spatial regions play a fundamental role in geographical information systems, spatial and constraint databases, and spatial reasoning in AI. In analogy with Halpern and Shoham's modal logic of time intervals based on the Allen relations, we introduce a family of modal logics equipped with eight modal operators that are interpreted by the Egenhofer-Franzosa (or RCC8) relations between regions in topological spaces such as the real plane. We investigate the expressive power and computational complexity of logics obtained in this way. It turns out that our modal logics have the same expressive power as the two-variable fragment of first-order logic, but are exponentially less succinct. The complexity ranges from (undecidable and) recursively enumerable to highly undecidable, where the recursively enumerable logics are obtained by considering substructures of structures induced by topological spaces. As our undecidability results also capture logics based on the real line, they improve upon undecidability results for interval temporal logics by Halpern and Shoham. We also analyze modal logics based on the five RCC5 relations, with similar results regarding the expressive power, but weaker results regarding the complexity

Convolution, Separation and Concurrency

A notion of convolution is presented in the context of formal power series together with lifting constructions characterising algebras of such series, which usually are quantales. A number of examples underpin the universality of these constructions, the most prominent ones being separation logics, where convolution is separating conjunction in an assertion quantale; interval logics, where convolution is the chop operation; and stream interval functions, where convolution is used for analysing the trajectories of dynamical or real-time systems. A Hoare logic is constructed in a generic fashion on the power series quantale, which applies to each of these examples. In many cases, commutative notions of convolution have natural interpretations as concurrency operations.Comment: 39 page