Model-checking of causality properties

A temporal logic for causality (TLC) is introduced. The logic is interpreted over causal structures corresponding to partial order executions of programs. For causal structures describing the behavior of a finite fixed set of processes, a TLC-formula can, equivalently, be interpreted over their linearizations. The main result of the paper is a tableau construction that gives a singly-exponential translation from a TLC formula φ to a Streett automaton that accepts the set of linearization satisfying φ. This allows both checking the validity of TLC formulas and model-checking of program properties. As the logic TLC does not distinguish among different linearizations of the same partial order execution, partial order reduction techniques can be applied to alleviate the state-space explosion problem of model-checking.