Temporal Logic Query Checking through Multi-Valued Model Checking

Temporal logic query checking was first introduced by William Chan [3] to speed up design understanding by discovering properties not known a priori. A query is a temporal logic formula containing a special symbol ?1, known as a placeholder. Given a Kripke structure and a propositional formula ', we say that ' satisfies the query if replacing the placeholder by ' results in a temporal logic formula satisfied by the Kripke structure. A solution to a temporal logic query on a Kripke structure is the set of all propositional formulas that satisfy the query. In this paper, we show that query checking is an instance of a multi-valued model-checking of Chechik et al [7]. There are several advantages of this approach. Firstly, it provides a formal framework for extending the query language to include multiple dependent and independent placeholders, occurring in both positive and negative positions in the query. Secondly, it enables us to reuse an existing multi-valued model-checker Chek [6] as a temporal logic query checker. Finally, it allows us to study the complexity of the query checking problem from the symbolic representation point of view.