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LTL is frequently used to express specifications in many domains such as embedded systems or business processes. Witnesses can help to understand why an LTL specification is satisfiable, and a number of approaches exist to make understanding a witness easier. In the case of unsatisfiable specifications unsatisfiable cores (UCs), i.e., parts of an unsatisfiable formula that are themselves unsatisfiable, are a well established means for debugging. However, little work has been done to help understanding a UC of an unsatisfiable LTL formula. In this paper we suggest to enhance a UC of an unsatisfiable LTL formula with additional information about the time points at which the subformulas of the UC are relevant for unsatisfiability. For example, in "(G p) and (X not p)" the first occurrence of "p" is really only "relevant" for unsatisfiability at time point 1 (time starts at time point 0). We present a method to extract such information from the resolution graph of a temporal resolution proof of unsatisfiability of an LTL formula. We implement our method in TRP++, and we experimentally evaluate it. Source code of our tool is available., Comment: In Proceedings QAPL 2013, arXiv:1306.2413

Unsatisfiable cores (UCs) are a well established means for debugging in a declarative setting. Still, there are few tools that perform automated extraction of UCs for LTL. Existing tools compute a UC as an unsatisfiable subset of the set of top-level conjuncts of an LTL formula. Using resolution graphs to extract UCs is common in other domains such as SAT. In this article we construct and optimize resolution graphs for temporal resolution as implemented in the temporal resolution-based solver TRP++, and we use them to extract UCs for propositional LTL. The resulting UCs are more fine-grained than the UCs obtained from existing tools because UC extraction also simplifies top-level conjuncts instead of treating them as atomic entities. For example, given an unsatisfiable LTL formula of the form $\phi \equiv ({\bf G} \psi) \wedge {\bf F} \psi'$ existing tools return $\phi$ as a UC irrespective of the complexity of $\psi$ and $\psi'$, whereas the approach presented in this article continues to remove parts not required for unsatisfiability inside $\psi$ and $\psi'$. Our approach also identifies groups of occurrences of a proposition that do not interact in a proof of unsatisfiability. We implement our approach in TRP++. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that our approach (i) extracts UCs that are often significantly smaller than the input formula with an acceptable overhead and (ii) produces more fine-grained UCs than competing tools while remaining at least competitive in terms of run time and memory usage. The source code of our tool is publicly available., Comment: Full version of an Acta Informatica paper

We consider the problem of bounded model checking (BMC) for linear temporal logic (LTL). We present several efficient encodings that have size linear in the bound. Furthermore, we show how the encodings can be extended to LTL with past operators (PLTL). The generalised encoding is still of linear size, but cannot detect minimal length counterexamples. By using the virtual unrolling technique minimal length counterexamples can be captured, however, the size of the encoding is quadratic in the specification. We also extend virtual unrolling to Buchi automata, enabling them to accept minimal length counterexamples. Our BMC encodings can be made incremental in order to benefit from incremental SAT technology. With fairly small modifications the incremental encoding can be further enhanced with a termination check, allowing us to prove properties with BMC. Experiments clearly show that our new encodings improve performance of BMC considerably, particularly in the case of the incremental encoding, and that they are very competitive for finding bugs. An analysis of the liveness-to-safety transformation reveals many similarities to the BMC encodings in this paper. Using the liveness-to-safety translation with BDD-based invariant checking results in an efficient method to find shortest counterexamples that complements the BMC-based approach., Comment: Final version for Logical Methods in Computer Science CAV 2005 special issue