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This paper studies temporal planning in probabilistic environments, modeled as labeled Markov decision processes (MDPs), with user preferences over multiple temporal goals. Existing works reflect such preferences as a prioritized list of goals. This paper introduces a new specification language, termed prioritized qualitative choice linear temporal logic on finite traces, which augments linear temporal logic on finite traces with prioritized conjunction and ordered disjunction from prioritized qualitative choice logic. This language allows for succinctly specifying temporal objectives with corresponding preferences accomplishing each temporal task. The finite traces that describe the system's behaviors are ranked based on their dissatisfaction scores with respect to the formula. We propose a systematic translation from the new language to a weighted deterministic finite automaton. Utilizing this computational model, we formulate and solve a problem of computing an optimal policy that minimizes the expected score of dissatisfaction given user preferences. We demonstrate the efficacy and applicability of the logic and the algorithm on several case studies with detailed analyses for each.
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This content will become publicly available on May 6, 2026
Falsification and Control of CPS using the Language Set of Discrete-Time Temporal Logic
We present algorithms for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) falsification and control, which take advantage of knowing the entire language of the temporal logic specification - that is, the set of signals that satisfy the formula. In the design of CPS, falsification and control play key roles. Falsification is a testing task, where the goal is to find an input signal that causes the system's output trajectory to violate the correctness requirements. Control is the dual task, where the goal is to find an input signal that causes the system's output to satisfy the specification. When the specification is expressed in a temporal logic, most existing work relies on local optimization heuristics to perform both tasks. In this paper, we explore whether a different expression of the specification offers advantages when performing falsification and control. Recent work presented a method for computing a representation of the language of a formula in (discrete-time) Signal Temporal Logic (STL), showing that the language can be represented as a union of polytopes. We introduce new falsification algorithms which combine distance information to the different components of the language to accelerate the convergence to a falsifier. And we introduce a new algorithm for computing a satisfying control signal which works by repeatedly projecting violating output trajectories back onto the language's components. Moreover, these algorithms are trivially parallelizable to take advantage of multiple processors. Despite their relative simplicity, our algorithms demonstrate 10x to 100x speedups relative to the state-of-the-art.
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- PAR ID:
- 10612652
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- ISBN:
- 9798400714986
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 10
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Irvine CA USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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