A complete axiom system for propositional interval temporal logic with infinite time

Date

2012-08

Advisors

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

ISSN

1860-5974

Volume Title

Publisher

Tech Univ Braunschweigb

Type

Article

Peer reviewed

Abstract

Interval Temporal Logic (ITL) is an established temporal formalism for reasoning about time periods. For over 25 years, it has been applied in a number of ways and several ITL variants, axiom systems and tools have been investigated. We solve the longstanding open problem of finding a complete axiom system for basic quantifier-free propositional ITL (PITL) with infinite time for analysing nonterminating computational systems. Our completeness proof uses a reduction to completeness for PITL with finite time and conventional propositional linear-time temporal logic. Unlike completeness proofs of equally expressive logics with nonelementary computational complexity, our semantic approach does not use tableaux, subformula closures or explicit deductions involving encodings of omega automata and nontrivial techniques for complementing them. We believe that our result also provides evidence of the naturalness of interval-based reasoning.

Description

Keywords

Interval Temporal Logic, axiom system, axiomatic completeness, omega-regular languages, omega-regular logics, compositionality

Citation

Moszkowski, B. (2012) A complete axiom system for propositional interval temporal logic with infinite time. Logical Methods in Computer Science, 8 (3), Paper 10, pp. 1-56

Rights

Research Institute