2020/02/04 by Christoph Matheja, Pagel, Jens, Matheja, Christoph +2
Computer Science · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Formal Methods in Verification #Logic in Computer Science (cs.LO) #Logic, Reasoning, and Knowledge #Logic, programming, and type systems
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2002.01202
openalex publication_date 2020/02/04 · openalex created_date 2021/04/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We develop a doubly-exponential decision procedure for the satisfiability problem of guarded separation logic -- a novel fragment of separation logic featuring user-supplied inductive predicates, Boolean connectives, and separating connectives, including restricted (guarded) versions of negation, magic wand, and septraction. Moreover, we show that dropping the guards for any of the above connectives leads to an undecidable fragment. We further apply our decision procedure to reason about entailments in the popular symbolic heap fragment of separation logic. In particular, we obtain a doubly-exponential decision procedure for entailments between (quantifier-free) symbolic heaps with inductive predicate definitions of bounded treewidth (SLIDbtw) - one of the most expressive decidable fragments of separation logic. Together with the recently shown 2ExpTime-hardness for entailments in said fragment, we conclude that the entailment problem for SLIDbtw is 2ExpTime-complete - thereby closing a previously open complexity gap.