Decision procedures and expressiveness in the temporal logic of branching time

摘要

We consider the computation tree logic (CTL) proposed in (Sci. Comput. Programming 2 (1982), 241–260) which extends the unified branching time logic (UB) of (“Proc. Ann. ACM Sympos. Principles of Programming Languages, 1981,” pp. 164–176) by adding an until operator. It is established that CTL has the small model property by showing that any satisfiable CTL formulae is satisfiable in a small finite model obtained from the small “pseudomodel” resulting from the Fischer-Ladner quotient construction. Then an exponential time algorithm is given for deciding satisfiability in CTL, and the axiomatization of UB given in ibid. is extended to a complete axiomatization for CTL. Finally, the relative expressive power of a family of temporal logics obtained by extending or restricting the syntax of UB and CTL is studied.