# Adventures in Monitorability: From Branching to Linear Time and Back Again

## TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive theory of runtime monitorability for a highly expressive modal logic, comparing linear and branching time settings, and providing a hierarchy of monitorable fragments with guarantees.

## Contribution

It introduces an expressiveness hierarchy of monitorable fragments of Hennessy-Milner logic with recursion in linear time, and characterizes what properties can be monitored within each fragment.

## Key findings

- Established a hierarchy of monitorable logic fragments.
- Identified exactly which properties are monitorable in each fragment.
- Provided a framework for automatic synthesis of correct monitors.

## Abstract

This paper establishes a comprehensive theory of runtime monitorability for Hennessy-Milner logic with recursion, a very expressive variant of the modal $\mu$-calculus. It investigates the monitorability of that logic with a linear-time semantics and then compares the obtained results with ones that were previously presented in the literature for a branching-time setting. Our work establishes an expressiveness hierarchy of monitorable fragments of Hennessy-Milner logic with recursion in a linear-time setting and exactly identifies what kinds of guarantees can be given using runtime monitors for each fragment in the hierarchy. Each fragment is shown to be complete, in the sense that it can express all properties that can be monitored under the corresponding guarantees. The study is carried out using a principled approach to monitoring that connects the semantics of the logic and the operational semantics of monitors. The proposed framework supports the automatic, compositional synthesis of correct monitors from monitorable properties.