Closing a Gap in the Complexity of Refinement Modal Logic

Abstract

Refinement Modal Logic (RML), which was recently introduced by Bozzelli et al., is an extension of classical modal logic which allows one to reason about a changing model. In this paper we study computational complexity questions related to this logic, settling a number of open problems. Specifically, we study the complexity of satisfiability for the existential fragment of RML, a problem posed by Bozzelli, van Ditmarsch and Pinchinat. Our main result is a tight PSPACE upper bound for this problem, which we achieve by introducing a new tableau system. As a direct consequence, we obtain a tight characterization of the complexity of RML satisfiability for any fixed number of alternations of refinement quantifiers. Additionally, through a simple reduction we establish that the model checking problem for RML is PSPACE-complete, even for formulas with a single quantifier.