×

A complete axiom system for propositional interval temporal logic with infinite time. (English) Zbl 1256.03023

Summary: Interval temporal logic (ITL) is an established temporal formalism for reasoning about time periods. For over 25 years, it has been applied in a number of ways and several ITL variants, axiom systems and tools have been investigated. We solve the long-standing open problem of finding a complete axiom system for basic quantifier-free propositional ITL (PITL) with infinite time for analysing nonterminating computational systems. Our completeness proof uses a reduction to completeness for PITL with finite time and conventional propositional linear-time temporal logic. Unlike completeness proofs of equally expressive logics with nonelementary computational complexity, our semantic approach does not use tableaux, subformula closures or explicit deductions involving encodings of omega automata and nontrivial techniques for complementing them. We believe that our result also provides evidence of the naturalness of interval-based reasoning.

MSC:

03B44 Temporal logic
03B70 Logic in computer science
03D05 Automata and formal grammars in connection with logical questions

Software:

KIV
PDFBibTeX XMLCite
Full Text: DOI arXiv