Positional Properties in Temporal Logic
Abstract
We study positional properties in the context of game-based reactive synthesis. Our motivation stems from having a usable specification logic, for which tractable synthesis is guaranteed. We demonstrate that every -regular positional property (with respect to state- or edge-labelled game graphs), is expressible in linear-time temporal logic. Additionally, we provide some necessary and sufficient conditions for when an -regular property is positional, and identify well-behaved subclasses of -regular positional properties. Using varieties of languages, we prove that no class of -regular positional properties can simultaneously contain a prefix-independent property and be closed under Boolean operations. We conclude by discussing the implications on alternating-time temporal logic, where we isolate a few different fragments with tractable model checking, and compare the associated expressivity of such fragments.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.25628,
title = {Positional Properties in Temporal Logic},
author = {Jessica Newman and Benjamin Plummer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.25628},
year = {2026}
}