Multi-Head Monitoring of Metric Dynamic Logic

Runtime monitoring (or runtime verification) is an approach to checking compliance of a system's execution with a specification (e.g., a temporal formula). The system's execution is logged into a trace—a sequence of time-points, each consisting of a time-stamp and observed events. A monitor is an algorithm that produces verdicts on the satisfaction of a temporal formula on a trace.

We formalize the time-stamps as an abstract algebraic structure satisfying certain assumptions. Instances of this structure include natural numbers, real numbers, and lexicographic combinations of them. We also include the formalization of a conversion from the abstract time domain introduced by Koymans (1990) to our time-stamps.

We formalize a monitoring algorithm for metric dynamic logic, an extension of metric temporal logic with regular expressions. The monitor computes whether a given formula is satisfied at every position in an input trace of time-stamped events. Our monitor follows the multi-head paradigm: it reads the input simultaneously at multiple positions and moves its reading heads asynchronously. This mode of operation results in unprecedented time and space complexity guarantees for metric dynamic logic: The monitor's amortized time complexity to process a time-point and the monitor's space complexity neither depends on the event-rate, i.e., the number of events within a fixed time-unit, nor on the numeric constants occurring in the quantitative temporal constraints in the given formula.

The multi-head monitoring algorithm for metric dynamic logic is reported in our paper “Multi-Head Monitoring of Metric Dynamic Logic” published at ATVA 2020. We have also formalized unpublished specialized algorithms for the temporal operators of metric temporal logic.