Linear Time Datalog for Branching Time Logic

In this paper we show that Datalog is well-suited as a temporal veriication language. Dat-alog is a well-known database query language relying on the logic programming paradigm. We introduce Datalog LITE, a fragment of Datalog with well-founded negation, and present a linear time model checking algorithm for Datalog LITE. We show that Datalog LITE subsumes temporal languages such as CTL and the alternation-free-calculus, and in fact give easy syntactic characterizations of these temporal languages. We prove that Datalog LITE has the same expressive power as the alternation-free portion of guarded xed point logic.