Satisfiability checking for mission-time LTL

Abstract

Mission-time LTL (MLTL) is a bounded variant of MTL over naturals designed to generically specify requirements for mission-based system operation common to aircraft, spacecraft, vehicles, and robots. Despite the utility of MLTL as a specification logic, major gaps remain in analyzing MLTL, e.g., for specification debugging or model checking, centering on the absence of any complete MLTL satisfiability checker. We prove that the MLTL satisfiability checking problem is NEXPTIME-complete and that satisfiability checking, the variant of MLTL where all intervals start at 0, is PSPACE-complete. We introduce translations for MLTL-to-LTL,, MLTL-to-SMV, and MLTf-to-SMT, creating four options for MLTL satisfiability checking. Our extensive experimental evaluation shows that the MLTL-to-SMT transition with the Z3 SMT solver offers the most scalable performance.