Temporalized logics and automata for time granularity

Abstract

The ability of providing and relating temporal representations at different ‘grain levels’ of the same reality is an important research theme in computer science and a major requirement for many applications, including formal specification and verification, temporal databases, data mining, problem solving, and natural language understanding. In particular, the addition of a granularity dimension to a temporal logic makes it possible to specify in a concise way reactive systems whose behaviour can be naturally modeled with respect to a (possibly infinite) set of differently-grained temporal domains. Suitable extensions of the monadic second-order theory of $k$ successors have been proposed in the literature to capture the notion of time granularity. In this paper, we provide the monadic second-order theories of downward unbounded layered structures, which are infinitely refinable structures consisting of a coarsest domain and an infinite number of finer and finer domains, and of upward unbounded layered structures, which consist of a finest domain and an infinite number of coarser and coarser domains, with expressively complete and elementarily decidable temporal logic counterparts. We obtain such a result in two steps. First, we define a new class of combined automata, called temporalized automata, which can be proved to be the automata-theoretic counterpart of temporalized logics, and show that relevant properties, such as closure under Boolean operations, decidability, and expressive equivalence with respect to temporal logics, transfer from component automata to temporalized ones. Then, we exploit the correspondence between temporalized logics and automata to reduce the task of finding the temporal logic counterparts of the given theories of time granularity to the easier one of finding temporalized automata counterparts of them.