Event-Clock Nested Automata

In this paper we introduce and study Event-Clock Nested Automata (ECNA), a formalism that combines Event Clock Automata (ECA) and Visibly Pushdown Automata (VPA). ECNA allow to express real-time properties over non-regular patterns of recursive programs. We prove that ECNA retain the same closure and decidability properties of ECA and VPA being closed under Boolean operations and having a decidable language-inclusion problem. In particular, we prove that emptiness, universality, and language-inclusion for ECNA are EXPTIME-complete problems. As for the expressiveness, we have that ECNA properly extend any previous attempt in the literature of combining ECA and VPA

Complexity of Timeline-Based Planning over Dense Temporal Domains: Exploring the Middle Ground

In this paper, we address complexity issues for timeline-based planning over dense temporal domains. The planning problem is modeled by means of a set of independent, but interacting, components, each one represented by a number of state variables, whose behavior over time (timelines) is governed by a set of temporal constraints (synchronization rules). While the temporal domain is usually assumed to be discrete, here we consider the dense case. Dense timeline-based planning has been recently shown to be undecidable in the general case; decidability (NP-completeness) can be recovered by restricting to purely existential synchronization rules (trigger-less rules). In this paper, we investigate the unexplored area of intermediate cases in between these two extremes. We first show that decidability and non-primitive recursive-hardness can be proved by admitting synchronization rules with a trigger, but forcing them to suitably check constraints only in the future with respect to the trigger (future simple rules). More "tractable" results can be obtained by additionally constraining the form of intervals in future simple rules: EXPSPACE-completeness is guaranteed by avoiding singular intervals, PSPACE-completeness by admitting only intervals of the forms [0,a] and [b,$\infty$[.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2018, arXiv:1809.0241

Expressiveness and Decidability of Temporal Logics for Asynchronous Hyperproperties

Hyperproperties are properties of systems that relate different executions traces, with many applications from security to symmetry, consistency models of concurrency, etc. In recent years, different linear-time logics for specifying asynchronous hyperproperties have been investigated. Though model checking of these logics is undecidable, useful decidable fragments have been identified with applications e.g. for asynchronous security analysis. In this paper, we address expressiveness and decidability issues of temporal logics for asynchronous hyperproperties. We compare the expressiveness of these logics together with the extension S1S[E] of S1S with the equal-level predicate by obtaining an almost complete expressiveness picture. We also study the expressive power of these logics when interpreted on singleton sets of traces. We show that for two asynchronous extensions of HyperLTL, checking the existence of a singleton model is already undecidable, and for one of them, namely Context HyperLTL (HyperLTL_C), we establish a characterization of the singleton models in terms of the extension of standard FO[<] over traces with addition. This last result generalizes the well-known equivalence between FO[<] and LTL. Finally, we identify new boundaries on the decidability of model checking HyperLTL_C

Logical definability of Y-tree and trellis systolic ω-languages

In this paper we investigate the correspondence (in the style of the well known Büchi Theorem) between ω-languages accepted by systolic automata and suitable (proper) extensions of the Monadic Second Order theory of one successor (MSO[<]). To this purpose we extend Y-tree and trellis systolic automata to deal with ω-words and we study the expressiveness, closure and decidability properties of the two classes of ω-languages accepted by Y-tree and trellis automata, respectively. We define, then, two extensions of MSO[<], MSO[<,adj] and MSO[<,2x], which allow to express Y-tree ω-languages and trellis ω-languages, respectively

Interval Temporal Logic for Visibly Pushdown Systems

In this paper, we introduce and investigate an extension of Halpern and Shoham\u27s interval temporal logic HS for the specification and verification of branching-time context-free requirements of pushdown systems under a state-based semantics over Kripke structures. Both homogeneity and visibility are assumed. The proposed logic, called nested BHS, supports branching-time both in the past and in the future, and is able to express non-regular properties of linear and branching behaviours of procedural contexts in a natural way. It strictly subsumes well-known linear time context-free extensions of LTL such as CaRet [R. Alur et al., 2004] and NWTL [R. Alur et al., 2007]. The main result is the decidability of the visibly pushdown model-checking problem against nested BHS. The proof exploits a non-trivial automata-theoretic construction