Handling of Past and Future with Phenesthe+

TL;DR

This paper extends a specialized temporal logic and its implementation, Phenesthe+, to better handle future phenomena in complex event processing, demonstrating increased expressiveness without significant performance loss.

Contribution

It introduces two new modalities to Phenesthe+, enhancing its ability to represent future events, and compares its expressive power with other logics.

Findings

Enhanced logic increases expressive power for future events.

Phenesthe+ maintains efficiency despite added expressiveness.

Empirical evaluation confirms practical applicability.

Abstract

Writing temporal logic formulae for properties that combine instantaneous events with overlapping temporal phenomena of some duration is difficult in classical temporal logics. To address this issue, in previous work we introduced a new temporal logic with intuitive temporal modalities specifically tailored for the representation of both instantaneous and durative phenomena. We also provided an implementation of a complex event processing system, Phenesthe, based on this logic, that has been applied and tested on a real maritime surveillance scenario. In this work, we extend our temporal logic with two extra modalities to increase its expressive power for handling future formulae. We compare the expressive power of different fragments of our logic with Linear Temporal Logic and dyadic first-order logic. Furthermore, we define correctness criteria for stream processors that use our language. Last but not least, we evaluate empirically the performance of Phenesthe+, our extended implementation, and show that the increased expressive power does not affect efficiency significantly.