Metric Propositional Neighborhood Logics: Expressiveness, Decidability, and Undecidability

Interval temporal logics formalize reasoning about interval structures over (usually) linearly ordered domains, where time intervals are the primitive ontological entities and truth of formulae is defined relative to time intervals, rather than time instants. In this paper, we introduce and study Metric Propositional Neighborhood Logic (MPNL) over natural numbers. MPNL features two modalities referring, respectively, to an interval that is “met by” the current one and to an interval that “meets” the current one, plus an infinite set of length constraints, regarded as atomic propositions, to constrain the lengths of intervals. We argue that MPNL can be successfully used to capture important concepts and scenarios in different areas of artificial intelligence combining qualitative and quantitative interval temporal reasoning, thus providing a viable alternative to wellestablished logical frameworks such as Duration Calculus. We show that MPNL is decidable in double exponential time and that it is expressively complete with respect to a well-defined subfragment of the two-variable fragment FO[N,=, <, s] of first-order logic for linear orders with successor function, interpreted over natural numbers. Moreover, we show that MPNL can be extended in a natural way to cover full FO[N,=, <, s], but, unexpectedly, the latter (and hence the former), turns out to be undecidable.