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