Extending timed automaton and real-time logic to many-valued reasoning

Abstract

Past decade has witnessed a great advance in the field of dense-time formal methods for the specification, synthesis and analysis of real time systems. In this context timed automata and real-time temporal logics provide a simple, and yet general, way to model and specify the behavior of these systems. At the same time, iterative and incremental development has been massively adopted in professional practice. In order to get closer to this current trend, timed formal methods should be adapted to such lifecycle structures, getting over their traditional role of verifying that a model meets a set of fixed requirements. We advocate the suitability of many-valued reasoning in order to achieve this goal; in the scope of knowledge representation, many-valued reasoning is suitable to deal with both uncertainty and disagreement which are pervasive and desirable in an iterative and incremental design process. In this respect, this paper introduces SCTL/MUS-T methodology as an extension of timed automata and temporal logic theories to many-valued reasoning in real-time.