We consider here Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas interpreted over \emph{finite} traces. We denote this logic by LTLf. The existing approach for LTLf satisfiability checking is based on a reduction to standard LTL satisfiability checking. We describe here a novel direct approach to LTLf satisfiability checking, where we take advantage of the difference in the semantics between LTL and LTLf. While LTL satisfiability checking requires finding a \emph{fair cycle} in an appropriate transition system, here we need to search only for a finite trace. This enables us to introduce specialized heuristics, where we also exploit recent progress in Boolean SAT solving. We have implemented our approach in a prototype tool and experiments show that our approach outperforms existing approaches.
@article{arxiv.1403.1666,
title = {LTLf satisfiability checking},
author = {Jianwen Li and Lijun Zhang and Geguang Pu and Moshe Y. Vardi and Jifeng He},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1403.1666},
year = {2014}
}