An Efficient Normalisation Procedure for Linear Temporal Logic: Isabelle/HOL Formalisation

Salomon Sickert 📧

May 8, 2020

This is a development version of this entry. It might change over time and is not stable. Please refer to release versions for citations.

Abstract

In the mid 80s, Lichtenstein, Pnueli, and Zuck proved a classical theorem stating that every formula of Past LTL (the extension of LTL with past operators) is equivalent to a formula of the form $\bigwedge_{i=1}^n \mathbf{G}\mathbf{F} \varphi_i \vee \mathbf{F}\mathbf{G} \psi_i$, where $\varphi_i$ and $\psi_i$ contain only past operators. Some years later, Chang, Manna, and Pnueli built on this result to derive a similar normal form for LTL. Both normalisation procedures have a non-elementary worst-case blow-up, and follow an involved path from formulas to counter-free automata to star-free regular expressions and back to formulas. We improve on both points. We present an executable formalisation of a direct and purely syntactic normalisation procedure for LTL yielding a normal form, comparable to the one by Chang, Manna, and Pnueli, that has only a single exponential blow-up.

License

BSD License

Topics

Session LTL_Normal_Form