Quantified CTL: Expressiveness and Complexity

While it was defined long ago, the extension of CTL with quantification over atomic propositions has never been studied extensively. Considering two different semantics (depending whether propositional quantification refers to the Kripke structure or to its unwinding tree), we study its expressiveness (showing in particular that QCTL coincides with Monadic Second-Order Logic for both semantics) and characterise the complexity of its model-checking and satisfiability problems, depending on the number of nested propositional quantifiers (showing that the structure semantics populates the polynomial hierarchy while the tree semantics populates the exponential hierarchy)

ATLsc with partial observation

Alternating-time temporal logic with strategy contexts (ATLsc) is a powerful formalism for expressing properties of multi-agent systems: it extends CTL with strategy quantifiers, offering a convenient way of expressing both collaboration and antagonism between several agents. Incomplete observation of the state space is a desirable feature in such a framework, but it quickly leads to undecidable verification problems. In this paper, we prove that uniform incomplete observation (where all players have the same observation) preserves decidability of the model-checking problem, even for very expressive logics such as ATLsc.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2015, arXiv:1509.0685

Model Checking One-clock Priced Timed Automata

We consider the model of priced (a.k.a. weighted) timed automata, an extension of timed automata with cost information on both locations and transitions, and we study various model-checking problems for that model based on extensions of classical temporal logics with cost constraints on modalities. We prove that, under the assumption that the model has only one clock, model-checking this class of models against the logic WCTL, CTL with cost-constrained modalities, is PSPACE-complete (while it has been shown undecidable as soon as the model has three clocks). We also prove that model-checking WMTL, LTL with cost-constrained modalities, is decidable only if there is a single clock in the model and a single stopwatch cost variable (i.e., whose slopes lie in {0,1}).Comment: 28 page

Pure Nash Equilibria in Concurrent Deterministic Games

We study pure-strategy Nash equilibria in multi-player concurrent deterministic games, for a variety of preference relations. We provide a novel construction, called the suspect game, which transforms a multi-player concurrent game into a two-player turn-based game which turns Nash equilibria into winning strategies (for some objective that depends on the preference relations of the players in the original game). We use that transformation to design algorithms for computing Nash equilibria in finite games, which in most cases have optimal worst-case complexity, for large classes of preference relations. This includes the purely qualitative framework, where each player has a single omega-regular objective that she wants to satisfy, but also the larger class of semi-quantitative objectives, where each player has several omega-regular objectives equipped with a preorder (for instance, a player may want to satisfy all her objectives, or to maximise the number of objectives that she achieves.)Comment: 72 page

Game-based Synthesis of Distributed Controllers for Sampled Switched Systems

Switched systems are a convenient formalism for modeling physical processes interacting with a digital controller. Unfortunately, the formalism does not capture the distributed nature encountered e.g. in cyber-physical systems, which are organized as networks of elements interacting with local controllers. Most current methods for control synthesis can only produce a centralized controller, which is assumed to have complete knowledge of all the component states and can interact with all of them. In this paper, we consider a centralized-controller synthesis technique based on state-space decomposition, and use a game-based approach to extend it to a distributed framework

On the Expressiveness of QCTL

QCTL extends the temporal logic CTL with quantification over atomic propositions. While the algorithmic questions for QCTL and its fragments with limited quantification depth are well-understood (e.g. satisfiability of QkCTL, with at most k nested blocks of quantifiers, is (k+1)-EXPTIME-complete), very few results are known about the expressiveness of this logic. We address such expressiveness questions in this paper. We first consider the distinguishing power of these logics (i.e., their ability to separate models), their relationship with behavioural equivalences, and their ability to capture the behaviours of finite Kripke structures with so-called characteristic formulas. We then consider their expressive power (i.e., their ability to express a property), showing that in terms of expressiveness the hierarchy QkCTL collapses at level 2 (in other terms, any QCTL formula can be expressed using at most two nested blocks of quantifiers)

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

Logical Forms of Chronicles

A chronicle is a temporal model introduced by Dousson et al. for situation recognition. In short, a chronicle consists of a set of events and a set of real-valued temporal constraints on the delays between pairs of events. This work investigates the relationship between chronicles and classical temporal-model formalisms, namely TPTL and MTL. More specifically, we answer the following question: is it possible to find an equivalent formula in such formalisms for any chronicle? This question arises from the observation that a single chronicle captures complex temporal behaviours, without imposing a particular order of the events in time. For our purpose, we introduce the subclass of linear chronicles, which set the order of occurrence of the events to be recognized in a temporal sequence. Our first result is that any chronicle can be expressed as a disjunction of linear chronicles. Our second result is that any linear chronicle has an equivalent TPTL formula. Using existing expressiveness results between TPTL and MTL, we show that some chronicles have no equivalent in MTL. This confirms that the model of chronicle has interesting properties for situation recognition