Theorem Proving for Pointwise Metric Temporal Logic Over the Naturals via Translations

Abstract

We study translations from metric temporal logic (MTL) over the natural numbers to linear temporal logic (LTL). In particular, we present two approaches for translating from MTL to LTL which preserve the ExpSpace complexity of the satisfiability problem for MTL. In each of these approaches we consider the case where the mapping between states and time points is given by (i) a strict monotonic function and by (ii) a non-strict monotonic function (which allows multiple states to be mapped to the same time point). We use this logic to model examples from robotics, traffic management, and scheduling, discussing the effects of different modelling choices. Our translations allow us to utilise LTL solvers to solve satisfiability and we empirically compare the translations, showing in which cases one performs better than the other. We also define a branching-time version of the logic and provide translations into computation tree logic.