Towards determinism in PDL: relations and proof theory

Abstract

Abstract Guarded Kleene Algebra with Tests (GKAT) was presented as a fragment of KAT to abstract imperative programming languages, where only if-then-else and while-do statements are allowed in the language. The loss of expressiveness is, nevertheless, compensated by a clear advantage over KAT: it allows almost linear decidability of program equivalence. In this work, we give the first step to optimizing the complexity of dynamic logic equivalence, which is EXPTIME-complete in propositional dynamic logic (PDL). First, and based on strict deterministic PDL, we present guarded propositional dynamic logic (GPDL), a fragment of PDL where programs correspond to GKAT terms. It comes embedded, as expected, with a semantics over relational models and a sound axiomatisation. Then, we present a Natural Deduction system for GPDL, proving its soundness and completeness, concerning the axiomatisation. Based on Smolka et al. (2019, Proceedings of the ACM Programming Language 4), we obtain the main result of this work—the equivalence of GPDL programs can be established in almost linear time.