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Orna Kupferman*, Orna Grumberg

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

20 Scopus citations

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 lagged behind. However, users of these tools have to struggle with the limited expressive power of CTL and are often compelled to give up checking many important behaviours. 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 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, exactly as the one for CTL. In addition, we suggest an extension of it that, preserving its complexity, handles fairness.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)523-539
Number of pages17
JournalJournal of Logic and Computation
Volume6
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 1996
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
This research was supported by the fund for the promotion of research at the Technion. We thank Danny Geist for suggesting the representation of sad formulas using the EGU operator.

Keywords

  • Branching-time temporal logics
  • CTL
  • Model checking
  • Temporal logic

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