Hyperproperties are a modern specification paradigm that extends properties of a single trace to express properties of a set of traces. Temporal logics for hyperproperties studied in the literature, including HyperLTL, assume a synchronous semantics and enjoy a decidable model checking problem. In this article, we introduce two asynchronous and orthogonal extensions of HyperLTL, Stuttering HyperLTL (HyperLTL \({}_{S}\) ) and Context HyperLTL (HyperLTL \({}_{C}\) ). Both of these extensions are useful, for instance, to formulate asynchronous variants of information-flow security properties. We show that for these logics, model checking is in general undecidable. On the positive side, for each of them, we identify a fragment with a decidable model checking problem that subsumes HyperLTL and that can express meaningful asynchronous requirements. Moreover, we provide the exact computational complexity of model checking for these two fragments which, for the HyperLTL \({}_{S}\) fragment, coincides with that of the strictly less expressive logic HyperLTL.

Model checking (MC) for Halpern and Shoham's interval temporal logic HS has been recently investigated in a systematic way, and it is known to be decidable under three distinct semantics (state-based, trace-based and tree-based semantics), all of them assuming homogeneity in the propositional valuation. Here, we focus on the trace-based semantics, where the main semantic entities are the infinite execution paths (traces) of a given Kripke structure and intervals are fragments of traces. We introduce a quantitative extension of HS over traces, called Difference HS (DHS), allowing one to express timing constraints on the difference among interval lengths (durations). We show that MC and satisfiability of full DHS are in general undecidable, so, we investigate the decidability border for these problems by considering natural syntactical fragments of DHS. In particular, we identify a maximal decidable fragment DHSsimple of DHS proving in addition that the considered problems for this fragment are at least 2EXPSPACE-hard. Moreover, by exploiting new results on linear-time hybrid logics, we show that for an equally expressive fragment of DHSsimple, the problems are EXPSPACE-complete. Finally, we provide a characterization of HS over traces by means of the one-variable fragment of a novel hybrid logic.

Characterisations theorems serve as important tools in model theory and can be used to assess and compare the expressive power of temporal languages used for the specification and verification of properties in formal methods. While complete connections have been established for the linear-time case between temporal logics, predicate logics, algebraic models, and automata, the situation in the branching-time case remains considerably more fragmented. In this work, we provide an automata-theoretic characterisation of some important branching-time temporal logics, namely CTL* and ECTL* interpreted on arbitrary-branching trees, by identifying two variants of Hesitant Tree Automata that are proved equivalent to those logics. The characterisations also apply to Monadic Path Logic and the bisimulation-invariant fragment of Monadic Chain Logic, again interpreted over trees. These results widen the characterisation landscape of the branching-time case and solve a forty-year-old open question.

Abstract The growing diffusion of the latest information and communication technologies in different contexts allowed the constitution of enormous sensing networks that form the underlying texture of smart environments. The amount and the speed at which these environments produce and consume data are starting to challenge current spatial data management technologies. In this work, we report on our experience handling real-world spatiotemporal datasets: a stationary dataset referring to the parking monitoring system and a non-stationary dataset referring to a train-mounted railway monitoring system. In particular, we present the results of an empirical comparison of the retrieval performances achieved by three different off-the-shelf settings to manage spatiotemporal data, namely the well-established combination of PostgreSQL + PostGIS with standard indexing, a clustered version of the same setup, and then a combination of the basic setup with Timescale, a storage extension specialized in handling temporal data. Since the non-stationary dataset has put much pressure on the configurations above, we furtherly investigated the advantages achievable by combining the TSMS setup with state-of-the-art indexing techniques. Results showed that the standard indexing is by far outperformed by the other solutions, which have different trade-offs. This experience may help researchers and practitioners facing similar problems managing these types of data.

A classic result by Stockmeyer gives a non-elementary lower bound to the emptiness problem for star-free generalized regular expressions. This result is intimately connected to the satisfiability problem for interval temporal logic, notably for formulas that make use of the so-called chop operator. Such an operator can indeed be interpreted as the inverse of the concatenation operation on regular languages, and this correspondence enables reductions between non-emptiness of star-free generalized regular expressions and satisfiability of formulas of the interval temporal logic of chop under the homogeneity assumption. In this paper, we study the complexity of the satisfiability problem for suitable weakenings of the chop interval temporal logic, that can be equivalently viewed as fragments of Halpern and Shoham interval logic. We first consider the logic $\mathsf{BD}_{hom}$ featuring modalities $B$, for \emph{begins}, corresponding to the prefix relation on pairs of intervals, and $D$, for \emph{during}, corresponding to the infix relation. The homogeneous models of $\mathsf{BD}_{hom}$ naturally correspond to languages defined by restricted forms of regular expressions, that use union, complementation, and the inverses of the prefix and infix relations. Such a fragment has been recently shown to be PSPACE-complete . In this paper, we study the extension $\mathsf{BD}_{hom}$ with the temporal neighborhood modality $A$ (corresponding to the Allen relation \emph{Meets}), and prove that it increases both its expressiveness and complexity. In particular, we show that the resulting logic $\mathsf{BDA}_{hom}$ is EXPSPACE-complete.

Abstract Regression test prioritization (RTP) is an active research field, aiming at re‐ordering the tests in a test suite to maximize the rate at which faults are detected. A number of RTP strategies have been proposed, leveraging different factors to reorder tests. Some techniques include an analysis of changed source code, to assign higher priority to tests stressing modified parts of the codebase. Still, most of these change‐based solutions focus on simple text‐level comparisons among versions. We believe that measuring source code changes in a more refined way, capable of discriminating between mere textual changes (e.g., renaming of a local variable) and more structural changes (e.g., changes in the control flow), could lead to significant benefits in RTP, under the assumption that major structural changes are also more likely to introduce faults. To this end, we propose two novel RTP techniques that leverage tree kernels (TK), a class of similarity functions largely used in Natural Language Processing on tree‐structured data. In particular, we apply TKs to abstract syntax trees of source code, to more precisely quantify the extent of structural changes in the source code, and prioritize tests accordingly. We assessed the effectiveness of the proposals by conducting an empirical study on five real‐world Java projects, also used in a number of RTP‐related papers. We automatically generated, for each considered pair of software versions (i.e., old version, new version) in the evolution of the involved projects, 100 variations with artificially injected faults, leading to over 5k different software evolution scenarios overall. We compared the proposed prioritization approaches against well‐known prioritization techniques, evaluating both their effectiveness and their execution times. Our findings show that leveraging more refined code change analysis techniques to quantify the extent of changes in source code can lead to relevant improvements in prioritization effectiveness, while typically introducing negligible overheads due to their execution.

Monadic Second-Order Logic (MSO) extends First-Order Logic (FO) with variables ranging over sets and quantifications over those variables. We introduce and study Monadic Tree Logic (MTL), a fragment of MSO interpreted on infinite-tree models, where the sets over which the variables range are arbitrary subtrees of the original model. We analyse the expressiveness of MTL compared with variants of MSO and MPL, namely MSO with quantifications over paths. We also discuss the connections with temporal logics, by providing non-trivial fragments of the Graded µ-CALCULUS that can be embedded into MTL and by showing that MTL is enough to encode temporal logics for reasoning about strategies with FO-definable goals.

Strategy Logic (SL for short) is one of the prominent languages for reasoning about the strategic abilities of agents in a multi-agent setting. This logic extends LTL with first-order quantifiers over the agent strategies and encompasses other formalisms, such as ATL* and CTL*. The model-checking problem for SL and several of its fragments have been extensively studied. On the other hand, the picture is much less clear on the satisfiability front, where the problem is undecidable for the full logic. In this work, we study two fragments of One-Goal SL, where the nesting of sentences within temporal operators is constrained. We show that the satisfiability problem for these logics, and for the corresponding fragments of ATL* and CTL*, is ExpSpace and PSpace-Complete, respectively.

In this paper, we prove Pspace-completeness of the finite satisfiability and model checking problems for the fragment of Halpern and Shoham interval logic with modality , for the “suffix” relation on pairs of intervals, and modality , for the “sub-interval” relation, under the homogeneity assumption. The result significantly improves the Expspace upper bound recently established for the same fragment, and proves the rather surprising fact that the complexity of the considered problems does not change when we add either the modality for suffixes () or, symmetrically, the modality for prefixes () to the logic of sub-intervals (featuring only ).

In this article, we introduce and investigate an extension of Halpern and Shoham’s interval temporal logic HS for the specification and verification of branching-time context-free requirements of pushdown systems under a state-based semantics over Kripke structures enforcing visibility of the pushdown operations. The proposed logic, called nested BHS , supports branching-time both in the past and in the future and is able to express non-regular properties of linear and branching behaviours of procedural contexts in a natural way. It strictly subsumes well-known linear time context-free extensions of LTL such as CaRet [ 4 ] and NWTL [ 2 ]. The main result is the decidability of the visibly pushdown model-checking problem against nested BHS . The proof exploits a non-trivial automata-theoretic construction.

Hyperproperties are properties of systems that relate different executions traces, with many applications from security to symmetry, consistency models of concurrency, etc. In recent years, different linear-time logics for specifying asynchronous hyperproperties have been investigated. Though model checking of these logics is undecidable, useful decidable fragments have been identified with applications e.g. for asynchronous security analysis. In this paper, we address expressiveness and decidability issues of temporal logics for asynchronous hyperproperties. We compare the expressiveness of these logics together with the extension S1S[E] of S1S with the equal-level predicate by obtaining an almost complete expressiveness picture. We also study the expressive power of these logics when interpreted on singleton sets of traces. We show that for two asynchronous extensions of HyperLTL, checking the existence of a singleton model is already undecidable, and for one of them, namely Context HyperLTL (HyperLTL_C), we establish a characterization of the singleton models in terms of the extension of standard FO[<] over traces with addition. This last result generalizes the well-known equivalence between FO[<] and LTL. Finally, we identify new boundaries on the decidability of model checking HyperLTL_C.

Regression testing is a practice aimed at providing confidence that, within software maintenance, the changes in the code base have introduced no faults in previously validated functionalities. With the software industry shifting towards iterative and incremental development with shorter release cycles, the straightforward approach of re-executing the entire test suite on each new version of the software is often unfeasible due to time and resource constraints. In such scenarios, Test Case Prioritization (TCP) strategies aim at providing an effective ordering of the test suite, so that the tests that are more likely to expose faults are executed earlier and fault detection is maximised even when test execution needs to be abruptly terminated due to external constraints. In this work, we propose Genetic-Diff, a TCP strategy based on a genetic algorithm featuring a specifically-designed crossover operator and a novel objective function that combines code coverage metrics with an analysis of changes in the code base. We empirically evaluate the proposed algorithm on several releases of three heterogeneous real-world, open source Java projects, in which we artificially injected faults, and compare the results with other state-of-the-art TCP techniques using fault-detection rate metrics. Findings show that the proposed technique performs generally better than the baselines, especially when there is a limited amount of code changes, which is a common scenario in modern development practices.

It is recognized in the literature that finding representative data to conduct regression testing research is non-trivial. In our experience within this field, existing datasets are often affected by issues that limit their applicability. Indeed, these datasets often lack fine-grained coverage information, reference software repositories that are not available anymore, or do not allow researchers to readily build and run the software projects, e.g., to obtain additional information. As a step towards better replicability and data-availability in regression testing research, we introduce ReCover, a dataset of 114 pairs of subsequent versions from 28 open source Java projects from GitHub. In particular, ReCover is intended as a consolidation and enrichment of recent dedicated regression testing datasets proposed in the literature, to overcome some of the above described issues, and to make them ready to use with a broader number of regression testing techniques. To this end, we developed a custom mining tool, that we make available as well, to automatically process two recent, massive regression testing datasets, retaining pairs of software versions for which we were able to (1) retrieve the full source code; (2) build the software in a general-purpose Java/Maven environment (which we provide as a Docker container for ease of replication); and (3) compute fine-grained test coverage metrics. ReCover can be readily employed in regression testing studies, as it bundles in a single package full, buildable source code and detailed coverage reports for all the projects. We envision that its use could foster regression testing research, improving replicability and long-term data availability.

Model checking for Halpern and Shoham's interval temporal logic HS has been recently investigated in a systematic way, and it is known to be decidable under three distinct semantics (state-based, trace-based and tree-based semantics). Here, we focus on the trace-based semantics, where the main semantic entities are the infinite execution paths (traces) of the given Kripke structure, assuming in addition homogeneity in the propositional valuation. We introduce a quantitative extension of HS over traces, called Difference HS (DHS) allowing one to express timing constraints on the difference among interval lengths (durations). The quantitative extension of some modalities leads immediately to undecidability, so, we investigate the decidability border for the model checking and satisfiability problems by considering strict syntactical fragments of DHS. In particular, we identify the maximal decidable fragment DHSS of DHS proving in addition that the considered problems for the fragment are at least 2EXPSPACE-hard. Moreover, by exploiting new results on linear-time hybrid logics, we show that for an equally expressive fragment of DHSS, the problems are EXPSPACE-complete. Finally, we provide a characterization of HS over traces by means of the one-variable fragment of a novel hybrid logic.

The expressive power of interval temporal logics (ITLs) makes them one of the most natural choices in a number of application domains, ranging from the specification and verification of complex reactive systems to automated planning. However, for a long time, because of their high computational complexity, they were considered not suitable for practical purposes. The recent discovery of several computationally well-behaved ITLs has finally changed the scenario. In this paper, we investigate the finite satisfiability and model checking problems for the ITL D, that has a single modality for the sub-interval relation, under the homogeneity assumption (that constrains a proposition letter to hold over an interval if and only if it holds over all its points). We first prove that the satisfiability problem for D, over finite linear orders, is PSPACE-complete, and then we show that the same holds for its model checking problem, over finite Kripke structures. In such a way, we enrich the set of tractable interval temporal logics with a new meaningful representative.

In the context of End-to-End testing of web applications, automated exploration techniques (a.k.a. crawling) are widely used to infer state-based models of the site under test. These models, in which states represent features of the web application and transitions represent reachability relationships, can be used for several model-based testing tasks, such as test case generation. However, current exploration techniques often lead to models containing many near-duplicate states, i.e., states representing slightly different pages that are in fact instances of the same feature. This has a negative impact on the subsequent model-based testing tasks, adversely affecting, for example, size, running time, and achieved coverage of generated test suites. As a web page can be naturally represented by its tree-structured DOM representation, we propose a novel near-duplicate detection technique to improve the model inference of web applications, based on Tree Kernel (TK) functions. TKs are a class of functions that compute similarity between tree-structured objects, largely investigated and successfully applied in the Natural Language Processing domain. To evaluate the capability of the proposed approach in detecting near-duplicate web pages, we conducted preliminary classification experiments on a freely-available massive dataset of about 100k manually annotated web page pairs. We compared the classification performance of the proposed approach with other state-of-the-art near-duplicate detection techniques. Preliminary results show that our approach performs better than state-of-the-art techniques in the near-duplicate detection classification task. These promising results show that TKs can be applied to near-duplicate detection in the context of web application model inference, and motivate further research in this direction.

Hyperproperties are a modern specification paradigm that extends trace properties to express properties of sets of traces. Temporal logics for hyperproperties studied in the literature, including HyperLTL, assume a synchronous semantics and enjoy a decidable model checking problem. In this paper, we introduce two asynchronous and orthogonal extensions of HyperLTL, namely Stuttering HyperLTL (HyperLTLS) and Context HyperLTL (HyperLTLC). Both of these extensions are useful, for instance, to formulate asynchronous variants of information-flow security properties. We show that for these logics, model checking is in general undecidable. On the positive side, for each of them, we identify a fragment with a decidable model checking that subsumes HyperLTL and that can express meaningful asynchronous requirements. Moreover, we provide the exact computational complexity of model checking for these two fragments which, for the HyperLTLS fragment, coincides with that of the strictly less expressive logic HyperLTL.

In this paper, we establish Pspace-completeness of the finite satisfiability and model checking problems for the fragment of Halpern and Shoham interval logic with modality ⟨E⟩, for the "suffix" relation on pairs of intervals, and modality ⟨D⟩, for the "sub-interval" relation, under the homogeneity assumption. The result significantly improves the Expspace upper bound recently established for the same fragment, and proves the rather surprising fact that the complexity of the considered problems does not change when we add either the modality for suffixes (⟨E⟩) or, symmetrically, the modality for prefixes (⟨B⟩) to the logic of sub-intervals (featuring only ⟨D⟩).

In this paper, we investigate the module-checking problem of pushdown multi-agent systems (PMS) against ATL and ATL* specifications. We establish that for ATL, module checking of PMS is 2EXPTIME-complete, which is the same complexity as pushdown module-checking for CTL. On the other hand, we show that ATL* module-checking of PMS turns out to be 4EXPTIME-complete, hence exponentially harder than both CTL* pushdown module-checking and ATL* model-checking of PMS. Our result for ATL* provides a rare example of a natural decision problem that is elementary yet but with a complexity that is higher than triply exponential-time.

A classic result by Stockmeyer [Stockmeyer, 1974] gives a non-elementary lower bound to the emptiness problem for star-free generalized regular expressions. This result is intimately connected to the satisfiability problem for interval temporal logic, notably for formulas that make use of the so-called chop operator. Such an operator can indeed be interpreted as the inverse of the concatenation operation on regular languages, and this correspondence enables reductions between non-emptiness of star-free generalized regular expressions and satisfiability of formulas of the interval temporal logic of the chop operator under the homogeneity assumption [Halpern et al., 1983]. In this paper, we study the complexity of the satisfiability problem for a suitable weakening of the chop interval temporal logic, that can be equivalently viewed as a fragment of Halpern and Shoham interval logic featuring the operators B, for "begins", corresponding to the prefix relation on pairs of intervals, and D, for "during", corresponding to the infix relation. The homogeneous models of the considered logic naturally correspond to languages defined by restricted forms of regular expressions, that use union, complementation, and the inverses of the prefix and infix relations.

The problem of timeline-based planning (TP) over dense temporal domains is known to be undecidable. In this paper, we introduce two semantic variants of TP, called strong minimal and weak minimal semantics, which allow to express meaningful properties. Both semantics are based on the minimality in the time distances of the existentially-quantified time events from the universally-quantified reference event, but the weak minimal variant distinguishes minimality in the past from minimality in the future. Surprisingly, we show that, despite the (apparently) small difference in the two semantics, for the strong minimal one, the TP problem is still undecidable, while for the weak minimal one, the TP problem is just PSPACE-complete. Membership in PSPACE is determined by exploiting a strictly more expressive extension (ECA^+) of the well-known robust class of Event-Clock Automata (ECA) that allows to encode the weak minimal TP problem and to reduce it to non-emptiness of Timed Automata (TA). Finally, an extension of ECA^+ (ECA^{++}) is considered, proving that its non-emptiness problem is undecidable. We believe that the two extensions of ECA (ECA^+ and ECA^{++}), introduced for technical reasons, are actually valuable per sé in the field of TA.

The model-checking (MC) problem of Halpern and Shoham Interval Temporal Logic (HS) has been recently investigated in some papers and is known to be decidable. An intriguing open question concerns the exact complexity of the problem for full HS: it is at least EXPSPACE-hard, while the only known upper bound is non-elementary and is obtained by exploiting an abstract representation of Kripke structure paths called descriptors. In this paper we generalize the approach by providing a uniform framework for model-checking full HS and meaningful (almost maximal) fragments, where a specialized type of descriptor is defined for each fragment. We then devise a general MC alternating algorithm parameterized by the type of descriptor which has a polynomially bounded number of alternations and whose running time is bounded by the length of minimal representatives of descriptors (certificates). We analyze the time complexity of the algorithm and give, by non-trivial arguments, tight bounds on the length of certificates. For two types of descriptors, we obtain exponential upper and lower bounds which lead to an elementary MC algorithm for the related HS fragments. For the other types of descriptors, we provide non-elementary lower bounds. This last result addresses a question left open in some papers regarding the possibility of fixing an elementary upper bound on the size of the descriptors for full HS.

With the advent of Internet of Things (IoT) tech-nologies, there is a rapidly growing number of connected devices, producing more and more data, potentially useful for a large number of applications. The streams of data coming from each connected device can be seen as collections of Time Series, which need proper techniques to guarantee their persistence. In particular, these solutions must be able to provide both an effective data ingestion and data retrieval, which are challenging tasks. This problem is particularly sensible in the Industrial IoT (IIoT) context, given the potentially great number of equipment that could be instrumented with sensors generating time series. In this study we present the results of an empirical comparison of three NoSQL Database Management Systems, namely Cassandra, MongoDB and InfluxDB, in maintaining and retrieving gigabytes of real IIoT data, collected from an instrumented dressing machine. Results show that, for our specific Time Series dataset, InfluxDB is able to outperform Cassandra in all the considered tests, and has better overall performance respect to MongoDB.

In recent years, model checking with interval temporal logics is emerging as a viable alternative to model checking with standard point-based temporal logics, such as LTL, CTL, CTL*, and the like. The behavior of the system is modeled by means of (finite) Kripke structures, as usual. However, while temporal logics which are interpreted “point-wise” describe how the system evolves state-by-state, and predicate properties of system states, those which are interpreted “interval-wise” express properties of computation stretches, spanning a sequence of states. A proposition letter is assumed to hold over a computation stretch (interval) if and only if it holds over each component state (homogeneity assumption). A natural question arises: is there any advantage in replacing points by intervals as the primary temporal entities, or is it just a matter of taste? In this article, we study the expressiveness of Halpern and Shoham’s interval temporal logic (HS) in model checking, in comparison with those of LTL, CTL, and CTL*. To this end, we consider three semantic variants of HS: the state-based one, introduced by Montanari et al. in [30, 34], that allows time to branch both in the past and in the future, the computation-tree-based one, that allows time to branch in the future only, and the trace-based variant, that disallows time to branch. These variants are compared among themselves and to the aforementioned standard logics, getting a complete picture. In particular, we show that HS with trace-based semantics is equivalent to LTL (but at least exponentially more succinct), HS with computation-tree-based semantics is equivalent to finitary CTL*, and HS with state-based semantics is incomparable with all of them (LTL, CTL, and CTL*).

In this paper, we investigate the finite satisfiability and model checking problems for the logic D of the sub-interval relation under the homogeneity assumption, that constrains a proposition letter to hold over an interval if and only if it holds over all its points. First, we prove that the satisfiability problem for D, over finite linear orders, is PSPACE-complete; then, we show that its model checking problem, over finite Kripke structures, is PSPACE-complete as well.

In the last years, model checking with interval temporal logics is emerging as a viable alternative to model checking with standard point-based temporal logics, such as LTL, CTL, CTL*, and the like. The behavior of the system is modeled by means of (finite) Kripke structures, as usual. However, while temporal logics which are interpreted "point-wise" describe how the system evolves state-by-state, and predicate properties of system states, those which are interpreted "interval-wise" express properties of computation stretches, spanning a sequence of states. A proposition letter is assumed to hold over a computation stretch (interval) if and only if it holds over each component state (homogeneity assumption). A natural question arises: is there any advantage in replacing points by intervals as the primary temporal entities, or is it just a matter of taste? In this paper, we study the expressiveness of Halpern and Shoham's interval temporal logic (HS) in model checking, in comparison with those of LTL, CTL, and CTL*. To this end, we consider three semantic variants of HS: the state-based one, introduced by Montanari et al., that allows time to branch both in the past and in the future, the computation-tree-based one, that allows time to branch in the future only, and the trace-based variant, that disallows time to branch. These variants are compared among themselves and to the aforementioned standard logics, getting a complete picture. In particular, we show that HS with trace-based semantics is equivalent to LTL (but at least exponentially more succinct), HS with computation-tree-based semantics is equivalent to finitary CTL*, and HS with state-based semantics is incomparable with all of them (LTL, CTL, and CTL*).

Model checking is commonly recognized as one of the most effective tool in system verification. While it has been systematically investigated in the context of classical, point-based temporal logics, it is still largely unexplored in the interval logic setting. Recently, a non-elementary model checking algorithm for Halpern and Shoham's modal logic of time intervals HS, interpreted over finite Kripke structures, has been proposed, together with a proof of the EXPSPACE-hardness of the problem. In this paper, we devise an EXPSPACE model checking procedure for two meaningful HS fragments. It exploits a suitable contraction technique, that allows one to replace long enough tracks of a Kripke structure by equivalent shorter ones.

Model checking has been successfully used in many computer science fields, including artificial intelligence, theoretical computer science, and databases. Most of the proposed solutions make use of classical, point-based temporal logics, while little work has been done in the interval temporal logic setting. Recently, a non-elementary model checking algorithm for Halpern and Shoham's modal logic of time intervals HS over finite Kripke structures (under the homogeneity assumption) and an EXPSPACE model checking procedure for two meaningful fragments of it have been proposed. In this paper, we show that more efficient model checking procedures can be developed for some expressive enough fragments of HS.

Model checking is a powerful method widely explored in formal verification. Given a model of a system, e.g. A Kripke structure, and a formula specifying its expected behavior, one can verify whether the system meets the behavior by checking the formula against the model. Classically, system behavior is given as a formula of a temporal logic, such as LTL and the like. These logics are "point-wise" interpreted, as they describe how the system evolves state-by-state. However, there are relevant properties, such as those involving temporal aggregations, which are inherently "interval-based", and thus asking for an interval temporal logic. In this paper, we give a formalization of the model checking problem in an interval logic setting. First, we provide an interpretation of formulas of Halpern and Shoham's interval temporal logic HS over Kripke structures, which allows one to check interval properties of computations. Then, we prove that the model checking problem for HS against Kripke structures is decidable by a suitable small model theorem, and we outline a PSpace decision procedure for the meaningful fragments AAbarBBbar and AAbarEEbar.

MOTIVATION: Identification of differential expressed genes has led to countless new discoveries. However, differentially expressed genes are only a proxy for finding dysregulated pathways. The problem is to identify how the network of regulatory and physical interactions rewires in different conditions or in disease. RESULTS: We developed a procedure named DINA (DIfferential Network Analysis), which is able to identify set of genes, whose co-regulation is condition-specific, starting from a collection of condition-specific gene expression profiles. DINA is also able to predict which transcription factors (TFs) may be responsible for the pathway condition-specific co-regulation. We derived 30 tissue-specific gene networks in human and identified several metabolic pathways as the most differentially regulated across the tissues. We correctly identified TFs such as Nuclear Receptors as their main regulators and demonstrated that a gene with unknown function (YEATS2) acts as a negative regulator of hepatocyte metabolism. Finally, we showed that DINA can be used to make hypotheses on dysregulated pathways during disease progression. By analyzing gene expression profiles across primary and transformed hepatocytes, DINA identified hepatocarcinoma-specific metabolic and transcriptional pathway dysregulation. AVAILABILITY: We implemented an on-line web-tool http://dina.tigem.it enabling the user to apply DINA to identify tissue-specific pathways or gene signatures. CONTACT: [email protected] SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

The paper proposes a temporal extension of Recursive State Machines (RSMs), called Timed RSMs (TRSMs). A TRSM is an indexed collection of Timed Automata allowed to invoke other Timed Automata (procedural calls). The classes of TRSMs are related to an extension of Pushdown Timed Automata, called EPTAs, where an additional stack, coupled with the standard control stack, is used to store temporal valuations of clocks. A number of subclasses of TRSMs and EPTAs are considered and compared through bisimulation of their timed LTSs. It is shown that EPTAs and TRSMs can be used to recognize classes of timed languages exhibiting context-free properties not only in the untimed “control” part, but also in the associated temporal dimension. The reachability problem for both TRSMs and EPTAs is investigated, showing that the problem is undecidable in the general case, but decidable for meaningful subclasses. The complexity is stated for a TRSMs subclass.

In this paper, we propose a new logical approach to represent and to reason about different time granularities. We identify a time granularity as an infinite sequence of time points properly labelled with proposition symbols marking the starting and ending points of the corresponding granules, and we symbolically model sets of granularities by means of linear time logic formulas. Some real-world granularities are provided, from a clinical domain and from the Gregorian Calendar, to motivate and exemplify our approach. Different formulas are introduced, which represent relations between different granularities. The proposed framework permits one to algorithmically solve the consistency, the equivalence, and the classification problems in a uniform way, by reducing them to the validity problem for the considered linear time logic.

In this paper, we study the definability and decidability of binary predicates for time granularity with respect to monadic theories over finitely and infinitely layered structures. We focus our attention on the equi-level (resp. equi-column) predicate constraining two time points to belong to the same layer (resp. column) and on the horizontal (resp. vertical) successor predicate relating a time point to its successor within a given layer (resp. column). We give a number of positive and negative results by reduction to/from a wide spectrum of decidable/undecidable problems.

We propose a logical approach to represent and reason about different time granularities. We identify a time granularity as a discrete infinite sequence of time points properly labelled with proposition symbols marking the starting and ending points of the corresponding granules, and we intensively model sets of granularities with linear time logic formulas. Some real-world granularities are provided to motivate and exemplify our approach. The proposed framework permits to algorithmically solve the consistency, the equivalence, and the classification problems in a uniform way, by reducing them to the validity problem for the considered linear time logic.

In this paper, a generalization of Kamp's theorem relative to the functional completeness of the until operator is proved. Such a generalization consists in showing the functional completeness of more expressive temporal operators with respect to the extension of the first‐order theory of linear orders MFO[<] with an extra binary relational symbol. The result is motivated by the search of a modal language capable of expressing properties and operators suitable to model time granularity in ω‐layered temporal structures.

We propose Timed Cooperating Automata (TCAs), an extension of the model Cooperating Automata of Harel and Drusinsky, and we investigate some basic properties. In particular we consider variants of TCAs based on the presence or absence of internal activity, urgency and reactivity, and we compare the expressiveness of these variants with that of the classical model of Timed Automata (TAs) and its extensions with periodic clock constraints and with silent moves. We consider also closure and decidability properties of TCAs and start a study on succinctness of their variants with respect to that of TAs.

The issue of automating the interpretation of data in geophysical exploration by means of artificial intelligence and pattern recognition techniques is addressed. The main features of the knowledge adopted by a domain expert are outlined and used as the basis for the design of a knowledge-based system named Horizons that will support the stratigraphic interpretation of seismic data. The architecture of the system is presented, including generation, validation, consistency-maintenance, and control modules, all designed as cooperating intelligent units. A prototype version of Horizons is presented, and results are briefly discussed.>