Model checking is a powerful method widely explored in formal verification to check the (state-transition) model of a system against desired properties of its behaviour. Classically, properties are expressed by formulas of a temporal logic, such as LTL, CTL, and CTL*. These logics are "point-wise" interpreted, as they describe how the system evolves state-by-state. On the contrary, Halpern and Shoham's interval temporal logic (HS) is "interval-wise" interpreted, thus allowing one to naturally express properties of computation stretches, spanning a sequence of states, or properties involving temporal aggregations, which are inherently "interval-based". In this paper, we study the expressiveness of HS in model checking, in comparison with that of the standard logics LTL, CTL, and CTL*. To this end, we consider HS endowed with three semantic variants: the state-based semantics, introduced by Montanari et al., which allows branching in the past and in the future, the linear-past semantics, allowing branching only in the future, and the linear semantics, disallowing branching. These variants are compared, as for their expressiveness, among themselves and to standard temporal logics, getting a complete picture. In particular, HS with linear (resp., linear-past) semantics is proved to be equivalent to LTL (resp., finitary CTL*).
@InProceedings{bozzelli_et_al:LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2016.26, author = {Bozzelli, Laura and Molinari, Alberto and Montanari, Angelo and Peron, Adriano and Sala, Pietro}, title = {{Interval vs. Point Temporal Logic Model Checking: an Expressiveness Comparison}}, booktitle = {36th IARCS Annual Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science (FSTTCS 2016)}, pages = {26:1--26:14}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-027-9}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2016}, volume = {65}, editor = {Lal, Akash and Akshay, S. and Saurabh, Saket and Sen, Sandeep}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2016.26}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-68615}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.FSTTCS.2016.26}, annote = {Keywords: Interval Temporal Logics, Expressiveness, Model Checking} }
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