Deciding first-order satisfiability when universal and existential variables are separated

DOI10.1145/2933575.2934532MaRDI QIDQ4635864zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Thomas Sturm, Marco Voigt, Christoph Weidenbach

Publication date 23 April 2018

Published in Proceedings of the 31st Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.08999

zbMATH Keywords

Bernays-Schönfinkel-Ramsey fragmentdecidable first-order fragmentfinite model propertymonadic fragment

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Subsystems of classical logic (including intuitionistic logic) (03B20) Decidability of theories and sets of sentences (03B25) Mechanization of proofs and logical operations (03B35) Analysis of algorithms and problem complexity (68Q25)

Abstract: We introduce a new decidable fragment of first-order logic with equality, which strictly generalizes two already well-known ones -- the Bernays-Sch"onfinkel-Ramsey (BSR) Fragment and the Monadic Fragment. The defining principle is the syntactic separation of universally quantified variables from existentially quantified ones at the level of atoms. Thus, our classification neither rests on restrictions on quantifier prefixes (as in the BSR case) nor on restrictions on the arity of predicate symbols (as in the monadic case). We demonstrate that the new fragment exhibits the finite model property and derive a non-elementary upper bound on the computing time required for deciding satisfiability in the new fragment. For the subfragment of prenex sentences with the quantifier prefix $exist{s}^{\ast }foral{l}^{\ast }exist{s}^{\ast }$ the satisfiability problem is shown to be complete for NEXPTIME. Finally, we discuss how automated reasoning procedures can take advantage of our results.

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