1-Background-Combining-logic-systems-Why，-how，-what-for.pdf

Combining logic systems: Why, how, what for? A. Sernadas C. Sernadas CLC, Departamento de Matem´atica, IST, Portugal November 12, 2003 1 Background The practical significance of the problem of combining logics is widely recog- nized, namely in knowledge representation (within artificial intelligence) and in formal specification and verification of algorithms and protocols (within soft- ware engineering and security). In these fields, the need for working with several calculi at the same time is the rule rather than the exception. For instance, in a knowledge representation problem it may be necessary to work with temporal, spatial, deontic and probabilistic aspects (e.g., for reasoning with mixed asser- tions like “with probability greater than 0.99, sometime in the future smoking will be forbidden everywhere”). And in a software verification problem it may be necessary to mix equational, epistemic and dynamic logic features. That is, one needs, at least, to be able to develop theories with components in different logic systems, or, even better, to work with theories defined in the combination of those logic systems (where such mixed assertions are allowed). Motivated by these applications that require the joint use of several deduc- tion formalisms, the interest in combination of logic systems has recently been growing (as reflected in the series [9, 20, 2, 18, 26, 1]), but the topic is also of interest on purely theoretical grounds. For instance, one might be tempted to look at predicate temporal logic as resulting from the combination of first-order logic and propositional temporal logic. However, the approach will be signif- icant only if general preservation results are available about the combination mechanism at hand. For example, if it has been estab