Policy Change for Treelike Monitors

Abstract: We study the policy change problem that arises in the runtime verification of long-running systems. The online monitors typically used in this context are generally treelike, in that they maintain substates that monitor subformulae of the target policy. We consider when and how the policy can be changed while the monitored system is running by only exploiting the information stored in the monitor's state. This is relevant, for example, to account for new system functionality or changes in regulatory requirements. We formally define the policy change problem in a general setting, independent of any specific (treelike) monitor implementation. We then show that policy change for past-time metric temporal logic (pMTL) is decidable but has tight non-primitive recursive lower and upper bounds, while with discrete-time semantics it is EXPSPACE-complete.