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On regular temporal logics with past

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Abstract

The IEEE standardized Property Specification Language, PSL for short, extends the well-known linear-time temporal logic LTL with so-called semi-extended regular expressions. PSL and the closely related SystemVerilog Assertions, SVA for short, are increasingly used in many phases of the hardware design cycle, from specification to verification. In this article, we extend the common core of these specification languages with past operators. We name this extension PPSL. Although all ω-regular properties are expressible in PSL, SVA, and PPSL, past operators often allow one to specify properties more naturally and concisely. In fact, we show that PPSL is exponentially more succinct than the cores of PSL and SVA. On the star-free properties, PPSL is double exponentially more succinct than LTL. Furthermore, we present a translation of PPSL into language-equivalent nondeterministic Büchi automata, which is based on novel constructions for 2-way alternating automata. The upper bound on the size of the resulting nondeterministic Büchi automata obtained by our translation is almost the same as the upper bound for the nondeterministic Büchi automata obtained from existing translations for PSL and SVA. Consequently, the satisfiability problem and the model-checking problem for PPSL fall into the same complexity classes as the corresponding problems for PSL and SVA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, CAB F 58.2, Universitätstr. 6, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Christian Dax

  2. Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, CNB F 107.1, Universitätstr. 6, 8092, Zurich, Switzerland

    Felix Klaedtke

  3. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Kassel, Wilhelmshöher Allee 73, 34121, Kassel, Germany

    Martin Lange

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  1. Christian Dax
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  2. Felix Klaedtke
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  3. Martin Lange
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Correspondence to Felix Klaedtke.

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Dax, C., Klaedtke, F. & Lange, M. On regular temporal logics with past. Acta Informatica 47, 251–277 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-010-0118-3

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