Abstract
The exponential gap between CTL and LTL model-checking complexity, led to a development of model-checking tools for CTL, while model checkers for LTL have stayed behind. However, users of those tools have to struggle with the limited expressive power of CTL and are often compelled to give up checking many important behaviors. As a matter of course, finding specification languages which are strictly more expressive than CTL and yet maintain its attractive model-checking complexity, is a challenging problem and has been an active area of research. In this paper we introduce such a language.
Our language, CTL2, is an outcome of a new approach for defining sub-languages of CTL*. The approach allows a bounded number of linear-time operators within the path formulas of CTL*. We discuss the expressive power of CTL2 and, in particular, focus on the relation between CTL2 and CTL. We show that beyond the increase in the expressive power, a substantial advantage of CTL2 is the neat and intuitive presentation it provides for specifications whose CTL equivalences are complicated and very hard to understand. We introduce a model-checking procedure for CTL2. Our model checker is of complexity linear in both the formula and the structure being checked, just as the one for CTL. In addition, we suggest an extension of it that, preserving its complexity, handles fairness.
Work carried out under a project on program verification and semantics of programming languages, funded by the Israeli academy of sciences (basic research). The second author was partially supported by the U.S.-Israeli Binational Science Foundation.
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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Bernholtz, O., Grumberg, O. (1994). Buy one, get one free !!!. In: Gabbay, D.M., Ohlbach, H.J. (eds) Temporal Logic. ICTL 1994. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 827. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0013990
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0013990
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