Strongly Equivalent Temporal Logic Programs

This paper analyses the idea of strong equivalence for transition systems represented as logic programs under the Answer Set Programming (ASP) paradigm. To check strong equivalence, we use a linear temporal extension of Equilibrium Logic (a logical characterisation of ASP) and its monotonic basis, the intermediate logic of Here-and-There (HT). Trivially, equivalence in this temporal extension of HT provides a sufficient condition for temporal strong equivalence and, as we show in the paper, it can be transformed into a provability test into the standard Linear Temporal Logic (LTL), something that can be automatically checked using any of the LTL available provers. The paper shows an example of the potential utility of this method by detecting some redundant rules in a simple actions reasoning scenario.