Logics and Automata for Verification: Expressiveness and Decidability Issues

Abstract

This dissertation investigates and extends the mathematical foundations of logics and automata for the interleaving and synchronous noninterleaving view of system computations with an emphasis on decision procedures and relative expressive powers, and introduces extensions of these foundations to the emerging domain of noninterleaving asynchronous computations. System computations are described as occurrences of system actions, and tractable collections of such computations can be naturally represented by finite automata upon which one can do formal analysis. Specifications of system properties are usually described in formal logics, and the question whether the system at hand satisfies its specification is then solved by means of automata-theoretic constructions