Model Checking the Quantitative mu-Calculus on Linear Hybrid Systems

We study the model-checking problem for a quantitative extension of the modal mu-calculus on a class of hybrid systems. Qualitative model checking has been proved decidable and implemented for several classes of systems, but this is not the case for quantitative questions that arise naturally in this context. Recently, quantitative formalisms that subsume classical temporal logics and allow the measurement of interesting quantitative phenomena were introduced. We show how a powerful quantitative logic, the quantitative mu-calculus, can be model checked with arbitrary precision on initialised linear hybrid systems. To this end, we develop new techniques for the discretisation of continuous state spaces based on a special class of strategies in model-checking games and present a reduction to a class of counter parity games.Comment: LMCS submissio

Model Checking Synchronized Products of Infinite Transition Systems

Formal verification using the model checking paradigm has to deal with two aspects: The system models are structured, often as products of components, and the specification logic has to be expressive enough to allow the formalization of reachability properties. The present paper is a study on what can be achieved for infinite transition systems under these premises. As models we consider products of infinite transition systems with different synchronization constraints. We introduce finitely synchronized transition systems, i.e. product systems which contain only finitely many (parameterized) synchronized transitions, and show that the decidability of FO(R), first-order logic extended by reachability predicates, of the product system can be reduced to the decidability of FO(R) of the components. This result is optimal in the following sense: (1) If we allow semifinite synchronization, i.e. just in one component infinitely many transitions are synchronized, the FO(R)-theory of the product system is in general undecidable. (2) We cannot extend the expressive power of the logic under consideration. Already a weak extension of first-order logic with transitive closure, where we restrict the transitive closure operators to arity one and nesting depth two, is undecidable for an asynchronous (and hence finitely synchronized) product, namely for the infinite grid.Comment: 18 page

The Complexity of Model Checking Higher-Order Fixpoint Logic

Higher-Order Fixpoint Logic (HFL) is a hybrid of the simply typed \lambda-calculus and the modal \lambda-calculus. This makes it a highly expressive temporal logic that is capable of expressing various interesting correctness properties of programs that are not expressible in the modal \lambda-calculus. This paper provides complexity results for its model checking problem. In particular we consider those fragments of HFL built by using only types of bounded order k and arity m. We establish k-fold exponential time completeness for model checking each such fragment. For the upper bound we use fixpoint elimination to obtain reachability games that are singly-exponential in the size of the formula and k-fold exponential in the size of the underlying transition system. These games can be solved in deterministic linear time. As a simple consequence, we obtain an exponential time upper bound on the expression complexity of each such fragment. The lower bound is established by a reduction from the word problem for alternating (k-1)-fold exponential space bounded Turing Machines. Since there are fixed machines of that type whose word problems are already hard with respect to k-fold exponential time, we obtain, as a corollary, k-fold exponential time completeness for the data complexity of our fragments of HFL, provided m exceeds 3. This also yields a hierarchy result in expressive power.Comment: 33 pages, 2 figures, to be published in Logical Methods in Computer Scienc

Dense-Timed Petri Nets: Checking Zenoness, Token liveness and Boundedness

We consider Dense-Timed Petri Nets (TPN), an extension of Petri nets in which each token is equipped with a real-valued clock and where the semantics is lazy (i.e., enabled transitions need not fire; time can pass and disable transitions). We consider the following verification problems for TPNs. (i) Zenoness: whether there exists a zeno-computation from a given marking, i.e., an infinite computation which takes only a finite amount of time. We show decidability of zenoness for TPNs, thus solving an open problem from [Escrig et al.]. Furthermore, the related question if there exist arbitrarily fast computations from a given marking is also decidable. On the other hand, universal zenoness, i.e., the question if all infinite computations from a given marking are zeno, is undecidable. (ii) Token liveness: whether a token is alive in a marking, i.e., whether there is a computation from the marking which eventually consumes the token. We show decidability of the problem by reducing it to the coverability problem, which is decidable for TPNs. (iii) Boundedness: whether the size of the reachable markings is bounded. We consider two versions of the problem; namely semantic boundedness where only live tokens are taken into consideration in the markings, and syntactic boundedness where also dead tokens are considered. We show undecidability of semantic boundedness, while we prove that syntactic boundedness is decidable through an extension of the Karp-Miller algorithm.Comment: 61 pages, 18 figure

Decidability of higher-order matching

We show that the higher-order matching problem is decidable using a game-theoretic argument.Comment: appears in LMCS (Logical Methods in Computer Science

Computation Tree Logic with Deadlock Detection

We study the equivalence relation on states of labelled transition systems of satisfying the same formulas in Computation Tree Logic without the next state modality (CTL-X). This relation is obtained by De Nicola & Vaandrager by translating labelled transition systems to Kripke structures, while lifting the totality restriction on the latter. They characterised it as divergence sensitive branching bisimulation equivalence. We find that this equivalence fails to be a congruence for interleaving parallel composition. The reason is that the proposed application of CTL-X to non-total Kripke structures lacks the expressiveness to cope with deadlock properties that are important in the context of parallel composition. We propose an extension of CTL-X, or an alternative treatment of non-totality, that fills this hiatus. The equivalence induced by our extension is characterised as branching bisimulation equivalence with explicit divergence, which is, moreover, shown to be the coarsest congruence contained in divergence sensitive branching bisimulation equivalence

Beyond Language Equivalence on Visibly Pushdown Automata

We study (bi)simulation-like preorder/equivalence checking on the class of visibly pushdown automata and its natural subclasses visibly BPA (Basic Process Algebra) and visibly one-counter automata. We describe generic methods for proving complexity upper and lower bounds for a number of studied preorders and equivalences like simulation, completed simulation, ready simulation, 2-nested simulation preorders/equivalences and bisimulation equivalence. Our main results are that all the mentioned equivalences and preorders are EXPTIME-complete on visibly pushdown automata, PSPACE-complete on visibly one-counter automata and P-complete on visibly BPA. Our PSPACE lower bound for visibly one-counter automata improves also the previously known DP-hardness results for ordinary one-counter automata and one-counter nets. Finally, we study regularity checking problems for visibly pushdown automata and show that they can be decided in polynomial time.Comment: Final version of paper, accepted by LMC

Decidability of Bisimulation Equivalence for Pushdown Processes

We show that bisimulation equivalence is decidable for pushdown automata without epsilon-transitions

A Tableau Proof System with Names for Modal Mu-calculus

Fixpoints are an important ingredient in semantics, abstract interpretation and program logics. Their addition to a logic can add considerable expressive power. One general issue is how to define proof systems for such logics. Here we examine proof systems for modal logic with fixpoints. We present a tableau proof system for checking validity of formulas which uses names to keep track of unfoldings of fixpoint variables as devised by Jungteerapanich