Metric Interval Temporal Logic ( $$\textsf {MITL} $$ ) is a popular formalism for specifying properties of reactive systems with timing constraints. Existing approaches to using $$\textsf {MITL} $$ in verification tasks, however, have notable drawbacks: they either support only limited fragments of the logic (the future only fragment $$\textsf {MITL} [\textsf{Fut}]$$ ) or allow for only incomplete verification. This paper introduces $$\textsc {MightyPPL} $$ , a new tool for translating formulae in Metric Interval Temporal Logic with Past and Pnueli modalities ( $$\textsf {MITPPL} $$ ) over the pointwise semantics into timed automata, enabling satisfiability and model checking of this expressive specification logic over both finite and infinite timed words. $$\textsc {MightyPPL} $$ optimises performance via specialised constructions for simple cases, a novel symbolic transition encoding, and a symmetry reduction technique that yields an exponential improvement in reachable discrete states. The tool generates language-equivalent automata compatible with back-ends such as Uppaal, TChecker, and LTSmin. Our evaluation demonstrates that $$\textsc {MightyPPL} $$ significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art tool $$\textsc {MightyL} $$ on future-only fragments and across various benchmarks.

We demonstrate a surprising and first-of-its-kind expressive equivalence between decidable metric and freeze logics over timed words in pointwise semantics. Our main result states that Metric Interval Temporal Logic with future, past and Pnueli modalities, MITPPL, and full unilateral timed propositional temporal logic with both future and past temporal modalities, UPTL, have identical expressiveness. One of the highlights of this paper, which allows for this equivalence, is to prove that UPTL formulas admit monadic decomposition. Our result also implies that several decidable logics for real-time specifications, such as one-variable UPTL, unilateral MITPPL, and Q2MLO, are all expressively equivalent, and the reductions between them are effective. Hence, our result unifies the fragmented expressiveness boundary of timed temporal logics. As corollaries, we resolve the open question of the decidability for full UPTL, and the variable or clock hierarchy problem for the future fragment of UPTL.

Finite (word) state transducers extend finite state automata by defining a binary relation over finite words, called rational relation. If the rational relation is the graph of a function, this function is said to be rational. The class of sequential functions is a strict subclass of rational functions, defined as the functions recognised by input-deterministic finite state transducers. The class membership problems between those classes are known to be decidable. We consider approximate versions of these problems and show they are decidable as well. This includes the approximate functionality problem, which asks whether given a rational relation (by a transducer), is it close to a rational function, and the approximate determinisation problem, which asks whether a given rational function is close to a sequential function. We prove decidability results for several classical distances, including Hamming and Levenshtein edit distance. Finally, we investigate the approximate uniformisation problem, which asks, given a rational relation R, whether there exists a sequential function that is close to some function uniformising R. As its exact version, we prove that this problem is undecidable.

We study the expressiveness of the pointwise interpretations (i.e. over timed words) of some predicate and temporal logics with metric and counting features. We show that counting in the unit interval (0,1) is strictly weaker than counting in (0,b) with arbitrary b≥0; moreover, allowing the latter to be included in temporal logics leads to expressive completeness for the metric predicate logic Q2MLO, recovering the corresponding result for the continuous interpretations (i.e. over signals). Exploiting this connection, we show that in contrast to the continuous case, adding ‘punctual’ predicates into Q2MLO is still insufficient for the full expressive power of the Monadic First-Order Logic of Order and Metric (FO[<,+1]); as a remedy, we propose a generalisation of the recently proposed Pnueli automata modalities and show that the resulting metric temporal logic is expressively complete for FO[<,+1]. On the practical side, we propose a compositional construction from metric interval temporal logic with counting or similar extensions to timed automata, which is more amenable to implementation based on existing tools that support on-the-fly model checking.

Vector addition systems with states (VASS) are a popular model for concurrent systems. However, many decision problems have prohibitively high complexity. Therefore, it is sometimes useful to consider overapproximating semantics in which these problems can be decided more efficiently. We study an overapproximation, called monus semantics, that slightly relaxes the semantics of decrements: A key property of a vector addition systems is that in order to decrement a counter, this counter must have a positive value. In contrast, our semantics allows decrements of zero-valued counters: If such a transition is executed, the counter just remains zero. It turns out that if only a subset of transitions is used with monus semantics (and the others with classical semantics), then reachability is undecidable. However, we show that if monus semantics is used throughout, reachability remains decidable. In particular, we show that reachability for VASS with monus semantics is as hard as that of classical VASS (i.e. Ackermann-hard), while the zero-reachability and coverability are easier (i.e. EXPSPACE-complete and NP-complete, respectively). We provide a comprehensive account of the complexity of the general reachability problem, reachability of zero configurations, and coverability under monus semantics. We study these problems in general VASS, two-dimensional VASS, and one-dimensional VASS, with unary and binary counter updates.

We investigate the decidability of the ${0,\infty}$ fragment of Timed Propositional Temporal Logic (TPTL). We show that the satisfiability checking of TPTL$^{0,\infty}$ is PSPACE-complete. Moreover, even its 1-variable fragment (1-TPTL$^{0,\infty}$) is strictly more expressive than Metric Interval Temporal Logic (MITL) for which satisfiability checking is EXPSPACE complete. Hence, we have a strictly more expressive logic with computationally easier satisfiability checking. To the best of our knowledge, TPTL$^{0,\infty}$ is the first multi-variable fragment of TPTL for which satisfiability checking is decidable without imposing any bounds/restrictions on the timed words (e.g. bounded variability, bounded time, etc.). The membership in PSPACE is obtained by a reduction to the emptiness checking problem for a new "non-punctual" subclass of Alternating Timed Automata with multiple clocks called Unilateral Very Weak Alternating Timed Automata (VWATA$^{0,\infty}$) which we prove to be in PSPACE. We show this by constructing a simulation equivalent non-deterministic timed automata whose number of clocks is polynomial in the size of the given VWATA$^{0,\infty}$.

Bounding the number of reversals in a counter machine is one of the most prominent restrictions to achieve decidability of the reachability problem. Given this success, we explore whether this notion can be relaxed while retaining decidability. To this end, we introduce the notion of an f-reversal-bounded counter machine for a monotone function f: ℕ → ℕ. In such a machine, every run of length n makes at most f(n) reversals. Our first main result is a dichotomy theorem: We show that for every monotone function f, one of the following holds: Either (i) f grows so slowly that every f-reversal bounded counter machine is already k-reversal bounded for some constant k or (ii) f belongs to Ω(log(n)) and reachability in f-reversal bounded counter machines is undecidable. This shows that classical reversal bounding already captures the decidable cases of f-reversal bounding for any monotone function f. The key technical ingredient is an analysis of the growth of small solutions of iterated compositions of Presburger-definable constraints. In our second contribution, we investigate whether imposing f-reversal boundedness improves the complexity of the reachability problem in vector addition systems with states (VASS). Here, we obtain an analogous dichotomy: We show that either (i) f grows so slowly that every f-reversal-bounded VASS is already k-reversal-bounded for some constant k or (ii) f belongs to Ω(n) and the reachability problem for f-reversal-bounded VASS remains Ackermann-complete. This result is proven using run amalgamation in VASS. Overall, our results imply that classical restriction of reversal boundedness is a robust one.

Metric Temporal Logic (MTL) and Timed Propositional Temporal Logic (TPTL) are prominent real-time extensions of Linear Temporal Logic (LTL). In general, the satisfiability checking problem for these extensions is undecidable when both the future (Until, U) and the past (Since, S) modalities are used (denoted by MTL[U,S] and TPTL[U,S]). In a classical result, the satisfiability checking for Metric Interval Temporal Logic (MITL[U,S]), a non-punctual fragment of MTL[U,S], is shown to be decidable with EXPSPACE complete complexity. A straightforward adoption of non-punctuality does not recover decidability in the case of TPTL[U,S]. Hence, we propose a more refined notion called non-adjacency for TPTL[U,S] and focus on its 1-variable fragment, 1-TPTL[U,S]. We show that non-adjacent 1-TPTL[U,S] is strictly more expressive than MITL. As one of our main results, we show that the satisfiability checking problem for non-adjacent 1-TPTL[U,S] is decidable with EXPSPACE complete complexity. Our decidability proof relies on a novel technique of anchored interval word abstraction and its reduction to a non-adjacent version of the newly proposed logic called PnEMTL. We further propose an extension of MSO [<] (Monadic Second Order Logic of Orders) with Guarded Metric Quantifiers (GQMSO) and show that it characterizes the expressiveness of PnEMTL. That apart, we introduce the notion of non-adjacency in the context of GQMSO (NA-GQMSO), which is a syntactic generalization of logic Q2MLO due to Hirshfeld and Rabinovich and show the decidability of satisfiability checking for NA-GQMSO.

This paper studies the reduction (abstraction) of finite-state transition systems for control synthesis problems. We revisit the notion of alternating simulation equivalence (ASE), a more relaxed condition than alternating bisimulations, to relate systems and their abstractions. As with alternating bisimulations, ASE preserves the property that the existence of a controller for the abstraction is necessary and sufficient for a controller to exist for the original system. Moreover, being a less stringent condition, ASE can reduce systems further to produce smaller abstractions. We provide an algorithm that produces minimal AS equivalent abstractions. The theoretical results are then applied to obtain (un)schedulability certificates of periodic event-triggered control systems sharing a communication channel. A numerical example illustrates the results.

This paper investigates Kamp-like and Büchi-like theorems for 1-clock Alternating Timed Automata (1-ATA) and its natural subclasses. A notion of 1-ATA with loop-free-resets is defined. This automaton class is shown to be expressively equivalent to the temporal logic $\regmtl$ which is $\mathsf{MTL[F_I]}$ extended with a regular expression guarded modality. Moreover, a subclass of future timed MSO with k-variable-connectivity property is introduced as logic $\qkmso$. In a Kamp-like result, it is shown that $\regmtl$ is expressively equivalent to $\qkmso$. As our second result, we define a notion of conjunctive-disjunctive 1-clock ATA ($\wf$ 1-ATA). We show that $\wf$ 1-ATA with loop-free-resets are expressively equivalent to the sublogic $\F\regmtl$ of $\regmtl$. Moreover $\F\regmtl$ is expressively equivalent to $\qtwomso$, the two-variable connected fragment of $\qkmso$. The full class of 1-ATA is shown to be expressively equivalent to $\regmtl$ extended with fixed point operators.

We study an extension of MTL in pointwise time with regular expression guarded modality Reg_I(re) where re is a rational expression over subformulae. We study the decidability and expressiveness of this extension (MTL+Ureg+Reg), called RegMTL, as well as its fragment SfrMTL where only star-free rational expressions are allowed. Using the technique of temporal projections, we show that RegMTL has decidable satisfiability by giving an equisatisfiable reduction to MTL. We also identify a subclass MITL+UReg of RegMTL for which our equisatisfiable reduction gives rise to formulae of MITL, yielding elementary decidability. As our second main result, we show a tight automaton-logic connection between SfrMTL and partially ordered (or very weak) 1-clock alternating timed automata.

Metric Temporal Logic MTL[UI, SI] is one of the most studied real time logics. It exhibits considerable diversity in expressiveness and decidability properties based on the permitted set of modalities and the nature of time interval constraints I. Henzinger et al., in their seminal paper showed that the non-punctual fragment of MTL called MITL is decidable. In this paper, we sharpen this decidability result by showing that the partially punctual fragment of MTL (denoted PMTL) is decidable over strictly monotonic finite point wise time. In this fragment, we allow either punctual future modalities, or punctual past modalities, but never both together. We give two satisfiability preserving reductions from PMTL to the decidable logic MTL[UI]. The first reduction uses simple projections, while the second reduction uses a novel technique of temporal projections with oversampling. We study the tradeoff between the two reductions: while the second reduction allows the introduction of extra action points in the underlying model, the equisatisfiable MTL[UI] formula obtained is exponentially more succinct than the one obtained via the first reduction, where no oversampling of the underlying model is needed. We also show that PMTL is strictly more expressive than the fragments MTL[UI, S] and MTL[U, SI].