Model checking has proven to be a useful analysis technique not only for concurrent systems, but also for the genetic regulatory networks (Grns) that govern the functioning of living cells. The applications of model checking in systems biology have revealed that temporal logics should be able to capture both branching-time and fairness properties. At the same time, they should have a user-friendly syntax easy to employ by non-experts. In this paper, we define Ctrl (Computation Tree Regular Logic), an extension of Ctl with regular expressions and fairness operators that attempts to match these criteria. Ctrl subsumes both Ctl and Ltl, and has a reduced set of temporal operators indexed by regular expressions, inspired from the modalities of Pdl (Propositional Dynamic Logic). We also develop a translation of Ctrl into HmlR (HennessyMilner Logic with Recursion), an equational variant of the modal calculus. This has allowed us to obtain an on-the-fly model checker with diagnostic for Ctrl ...
Radu Mateescu, Pedro T. Monteiro, Estelle Dumas, H