The Fluted Fragment with Transitive Relations

Abstract

We study the satisfiability problem for the fluted fragment extended with transitive relations. The logic enjoys the finite model property when only one transitive relation is available and the finite model property is lost when additionally either equality or a second transitive relation is allowed. We show that the satisfiability problem for the fluted fragment with one transitive relation and equality remains decidable. On the other hand we show that the satisfiability problem is undecidable already for the two-variable fragment of the logic in the presence of three transitive relations (or two transitive relations and equality).