Events in Linear-Time Properties

Abstract


For several decades, researchers in formal methods tried to create formalisms that permit natural specification of systems and allow mathematical reasoning about their correctness. The availability of fully-automated reasoning tools enables more non-specialists to use formal methods effectively --- their responsibility reduces to just specifying the model and expressing the desired properties. Thus, it is essential that these properties be represented in a language that is easy to use and sufficiently expressive. Linear-time temporal logic is a formalism that has been used extensively for specifying properties of systems. When such properties are closed under stuttering, verification tools can utilize a partial-order reduction technique to reduce the size of the model and thus analyze larger systems. If LTL formulas do not contain the ``next'' operator, the formulas are closed under stuttering, but the resulting language is not expressive enough to capture many important properties, e.g., properties involving events. Determining if an arbitrary LTL formula is closed under stuttering is hard --- it has been proven to be PSPACE-complete.

In this paper we relax the restriction on LTL that guarantees closure under stuttering, introduce the notion of edges in the context of LTL, and provide theorems that enable syntactic reasoning about closure under stuttering of LTL formulas.