On Expressiveness and Complexity in Real-Time Model Checking

Metric Interval Temporal Logic (MITL) is a popular formalism for expressing real-time specifications. This logic achieves decidability by restricting the precision of timing constraints, in particular, by banning so-called punctual specifications. In this paper we introduce a significantly more expressive logic that can express a wide variety of punctual specifications, but whose model-checking problem has the same complexity as that of MITL. We conclude that for model checking the most commonly occurring specifications, such as invariance and bounded response, punctuality can be accommodated at no cost.