Time for Timed Monitorability (2504.10008v1)

Abstract: Monitoring is an important part of the verification toolbox, in particular in situations where exhaustive verification using, e.g., model-checking, is infeasible. The goal of online monitoring is to determine the satisfaction or violation of a specification during runtime, i.e., based on finite execution prefixes. However, not every specification is amenable to monitoring, e.g., properties for which no finite execution can witness satisfaction or violation. Monitorability is the question whether a given specification is amenable to monitoring, and has been extensively studied in discrete time. Here, we study, for the first time, the monitorability problem for real-time specifications. For specifications given by deterministic Timed Muller Automata, we prove decidability while we show that the problem is undecidable for specifications given by nondeterministic Timed B\"uchi automata. Furthermore, we refine monitorability to also determine bounds on the number of events as well as the time that must pass before monitoring the property may yield an informative verdict. We prove that for deterministic Timed Muller automata, such bounds can be effectively computed. In contrast we show that for nondeterministic Timed B\"uchi automata such bounds are not computable.