Temporal Logic

Temporal logic has developed over the last 30 years into a powerful formal setting for the specification and verification of state-based systems. Based on university lectures given by the authors, this book is a comprehensive, concise, uniform, up-to-date presentation of the theory and applications of linear and branching time temporal logic; TLA (Temporal Logic of Actions); automata theoretical connections; model checking; and related theories. All theoretical details and numerous application examples are elaborated carefully and with full formal rigor, and the book will serve as a basic source and reference for lecturers, graduate students and researchers.

Reactive systems are computing systems which are interactive, such as real-time systems, operating systems, concurrent systems, control systems, etc. They are among the most difficult computing systems to program. Temporal logic is a formal tool/language which yields excellent results in specifying reactive systems. This volume, the first of two, subtitled Specification, has a self-contained introduction to temporal logic and, more important, an introduction to the computational model for reactive programs, developed by Zohar Manna and Amir Pnueli of Stanford University and the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, respectively.

Introduction to the temporal logic of - in particular paral- lel - programs.Divided into three main parts: - Presenta- tion of the pure temporal logic: language, semantics, and proof theory; - Representation of programs and their proper- ties within the language of temporal logic; - Application of the logical apparatus to the verification of program proper- ties including a new embedding of Hoare's logic into the temporal framework.

A comprehensive, modern and technically precise exposition of the theory and main applications of temporal logics in computer science.

This book is an introduction to temporal logic, a now flourishing branch of philosophical logic whose origin is of recent date, its main impetus having been provided by the publication in the late 1950s of A. N. PRIOR'S pioneering book, Time and Modality (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1957). Virtually all work in the field to around 1966 is surveyed in PRIOR'S elegant treatise Past, Present and Future (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1967). In consequence, it is no simple matter to write a comprehensive book on the subject with out merely rehearsing material already dealt with in PRIOR'S works. We believe, however, that the present book succeeds in this difficult endeavor because it approaches established materials from wholly novel points of departure, and is thus able to attain new perspectives and achieve new results. Its introductory character notwithstanding, the present work is consequently in substantial measure devoted to an exposition of new findings and a demonstration of new results. Parts of the book have been published previously. Chapter II is a modified version of an article of the same title by N. RESCHER and JAMES GARSON in The Journal of Symbolic Logic (vol. 33 [1968], pp.537-548). And Chapter XIII is a modified version of the article "Temporally Conditioned Descriptions" by N. RESCHER and JOHN ROBISON in Ratio, vol. 8 (1966), pp. 46-54. The authors are grateful to Professors GARSON and ROBISON, and to the editors of the jounal involved, for their permission to use this materials here.

This much-needed book provides a thorough account of temporal logic, one of the most important areas of logic in computer science today. The book begins with a solid introduction to semantical and axiomatic approaches to temporal logic. It goes on to cover predicate temporal logic, meta-languages, general theories of axiomatization, many dimensional systems, propositional quantifiers, expressive power, Henkin dimension, temporalization of other logics, and decidability results. With its inclusion of cutting-edge results and unifying methodologies, this book is an indispensable reference for both the pure logician and the theoretical computer scientist.

Time is a fascinating subject and has long since captured mankind's imagination, from the ancients to modern man, both adult and child alike. It has been studied across a wide range of disciplines, from the natural sciences to philosophy and logic. Today, thirty plus years since Prior's work in laying out foundations for temporal logic, and two decades on from Pnueli's seminal work applying of temporal logic in specification and verification of computer programs, temporal logic has a strong and thriving international research community within the broad disciplines of computer science and artificial intelligence. Areas of activity include, but are certainly not restricted to: Pure Temporal Logic, e. g. temporal systems, proof theory, model theory, expressiveness and complexity issues, algebraic properties, application of game theory; Specification and Verification, e. g. of reactive systems, ofreal-time components, of user interaction, of hardware systems, techniques and tools for verification, execution and prototyping methods; Temporal Databases, e. g. temporal representation, temporal query ing, granularity of time, update mechanisms, active temporal data bases, hypothetical reasoning; Temporal Aspects in AI, e. g. modelling temporal phenomena, in terval temporal calculi, temporal nonmonotonicity, interaction of temporal reasoning with action/knowledge/belief logics, temporal planning; Tense and Aspect in Natural Language, e. g. models, ontologies, temporal quantifiers, connectives, prepositions, processing tempo ral statements; Temporal Theorem Proving, e. g. translation methods, clausal and non-clausal resolution, tableaux, automata-theoretic approaches, tools and practical systems.

FROM THE PREFACE: This book has risen from a conference on Temporal Logic and Its Applications held at the University of Leeds in January 1986, under the auspices of the then newly-created Centre for Theoretical Computer Science. Temporal logic is a field which, having originated within philosophy, has now proved to be of relevance to several distinct areas in computer science. In this publication, all of the aspects of temporal logic are treated together, hopefully providing a stimulus to further inter-disciplinary collaboration, not only as regards temporal logic itself but also in connection with other logical and philosophical issues, which lie at the interface between computing and philosophy.

The subject of Time has a wide intellectual appeal across different dis ciplines. This has shown in the variety of reactions received from readers of the first edition of the present Book. Many have reacted to issues raised in its philosophical discussions, while some have even solved a number of the open technical questions raised in the logical elaboration of the latter. These results will be recorded below, at a more convenient place. In the seven years after the first publication, there have been some noticeable newer developments in the logical study of Time and temporal expressions. As far as Temporal Logic proper is concerned, it seems fair to say that these amount to an increase in coverage and sophistication, rather than further break-through innovation. In fact, perhaps the most significant sources of new activity have been the applied areas of Linguistics and Computer Science (including Artificial Intelligence), where many intriguing new ideas have appeared presenting further challenges to temporal logic. Now, since this Book has a rather tight composition, it would have been difficult to interpolate this new material without endangering intelligibility.