The Complexity of Propositional Linear Temporal Logics in Simple Cases

Abstract

It is well known that model checking and satisfiability for PLTL are PSPACE-complete. By contrast, very little is known about whether there exist some interesting fragments of PLTL with a lower worst-case complexity. Such results would help understand why PLTL model checkers are successfully used in practice. In this article we investigate this issue and consider model checking and satisfiability for all fragments of PLTL obtainable by restricting (1) the temporal connectives allowed, (2) the number of atomic propositions, and (3) the temporal height.