Marco Faella

Massimo Benerecetti, Marco Faella, Stefano Minopoli

In this paper we study the problem of automatically generating switching controllers for the class of Linear Hybrid Automata, with respect to safety objectives. We identify and solve inaccuracies contained in previous characterizations of the problem, providing a sound and complete symbolic fixpoint procedure, based on polyhedral abstractions of the state space. We also prove the termination of each iteration of the procedure. Some promising experimental results are presented, based on an implementation of the fixpoint procedure on top of the tool PHAVer.

Piero A. Bonatti, Marco Faella, Luigi Sauro

Some of the applications of OWL and RDF (e.g. biomedical knowledge representation and semantic policy formulation) call for extensions of these languages with nonmonotonic constructs such as inheritance with overriding. Nonmonotonic description logics have been studied for many years, however no practical such knowledge representation languages exist, due to a combination of semantic difficulties and high computational complexity. Independently, low-complexity description logics such as DL-lite and EL have been introduced and incorporated in the OWL standard. Therefore, it is interesting to see whether the syntactic restrictions characterizing DL-lite and EL bring computational benefits to their nonmonotonic versions, too. In this paper we extensively investigate the computational complexity of Circumscription when knowledge bases are formulated in DL-lite_R, EL, and fragments thereof. We identify fragments whose complexity ranges from P to the second level of the polynomial hierarchy, as well as fragments whose complexity raises to PSPACE and beyond.