Revisiting the expressiveness of metric temporal logic : A tale of "Je t'aime, moi non plus."

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Foughali, Mohammed Aristide
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Foughali, Mohammed Aristide
author_facet Foughali, Mohammed Aristide
contents The expressiveness of Metric Temporal Logic (MTL) has been extensively studied throughout the last two decades. In particular, it has been shown that the \emph{interval-based} semantics of MTL is strictly more expressive than the \emph{pointwise} one. These results may suggest that enabling the evaluation of formulae at arbitrary time points \emph{instead of} positions of timed events increases the expressive power of MTL. In this paper, we formally argue otherwise. We demonstrate that under standard models of finite or non-Zeno infinite (action-based) timed executions, the interval-based and the pointwise semantics are incomparable. We then propose a new \emph{mixed} semantics that embeds both the pointwise and the interval-based ones.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_15379
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Revisiting the expressiveness of metric temporal logic : A tale of "Je t'aime, moi non plus."
Foughali, Mohammed Aristide
Logic in Computer Science
The expressiveness of Metric Temporal Logic (MTL) has been extensively studied throughout the last two decades. In particular, it has been shown that the \emph{interval-based} semantics of MTL is strictly more expressive than the \emph{pointwise} one. These results may suggest that enabling the evaluation of formulae at arbitrary time points \emph{instead of} positions of timed events increases the expressive power of MTL. In this paper, we formally argue otherwise. We demonstrate that under standard models of finite or non-Zeno infinite (action-based) timed executions, the interval-based and the pointwise semantics are incomparable. We then propose a new \emph{mixed} semantics that embeds both the pointwise and the interval-based ones.
title Revisiting the expressiveness of metric temporal logic : A tale of "Je t'aime, moi non plus."
topic Logic in Computer Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15379