This volume addresses all current aspects of relational methods and their applications in computer science. It presents a broad variety of fields and issues in which theories of relations provide conceptual or technical tools. The contributions address such subjects as relational methods in programming, relational constraints, relational methods in linguistics and spatial reasoning, relational modelling of uncertainty. All contributions provide the readers with new and original developments in the respective fields.The reader thus gets an interdisciplinary spectrum of the state of the art of relational methods and implementation-oriented solutions of problems related to these areas

Time and logic are central driving concepts in science and technology. In this book, some of the major current developments in our understanding and application of temporal logic are presented in computational terms. \"Time and Logic: A Computational Approach\" should be a useful sourcebook for those within the specific field of temporal logic, as well as providing valuable introductory material for those seeking an entry into this increasingly important area of theoretical computing.; The emphasis of the book is on presenting a broad range of approaches to computational applications. The techniques used will also be applicable in many cases to formalize beyond temporal logic alone, and it is hoped that adaptation to many different logics of programmes will be facilitated. Throughout, the authors have kept implementation-oriented solutions in mind.; The book begins with an introduction to the basic ideas of temporal logic. Successive chapters then examine particular aspects of the temporal theoretical computing domain, relating their applications to familiar areas of research, such as stochastic process theory, automata theory, established proof systems, model checking, relational logic and classical predicate logic. This should be a useful addition to the library of all theoretical computer scientists, providing a synthesis of well established results in temporal logic with the most up-to-date findings of some of the world's leading theoreticians.

In recent years, a great deal of attention has been devoted to logics of \"commonsense\" reasoning. Among the candidates proposed, circumscription has been perceived as an elegant mathematical technique for modeling nonmonotonic reasoning, but difficult to apply in practice. The major reason for this is the nd-order nature of circumscription axioms and the difficulty in finding proper substitutions of predicate expressions for predicate variables. One solution to this problem is to compile, where possible, nd-order formulas into equivalent 1st-order formulas. Although some progress has been made using this approach, the results are not as strong as one might desire and they are isolated in nature. In this article, we provide a general method which can be used in an algorithmic manner to reduce circumscription axioms to 1st-order formulas. The algorithm takes as input an arbitrary 2nd-order formula and either returns as output an equivalent 1st-order formula, or terminates with failure. The class of 2nd-order formulas, and analogously the class of circumscriptive theories which can be reduced, provably subsumes those covered by existing results. We demonstrate the generality of the algorithm using circumscriptive theories with mixed quantifiers (some involving Skolemization), variable constants, non-separated formulas, and formulas with n-ary predicate variables. In addition, we analyze the strength of the algorithm and compare it with existing approaches providing formal subsumption results.