Abstract. Interval temporal logics are based on temporal structures where time intervals, rather than time instants, are the primitive ontological entities. They employ modal operators corresponding to various relations between intervals, known as Allen's relations. Technically, validity in interval temporal logics translates to dyadic second-order logic, thus explaining their complex computational behavior. The full modal logic of Allen's relations, called HS, has been proved to be undecidable by Halpern and Shoham under very weak assumptions on the class of interval structures, and this result was discouraging attempts for practical applications and further research in the field. A renewed interest has been recently stimulated by the discovery of interesting decidable fragments of HS. This paper contributes to the characterization of the boundary between decidability and undecidability of HS fragments. It summarizes known positive and negative results, it describes the main techniques applied so far in both directions, and it establishes a number of new undecidability results for relatively small fragments of HS.

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Unlike the Moon, the dark side of interval temporal logics is the one we usually see: their ubiquitous undecidability. Identifying minimal undecidable interval logics is thus a natural and important issue in that research area. In this paper, we identify several new minimal undecidable logics amongst the fragments of Halpern and Shoham’s logic HS, including the logic of the overlaps relation, over the classes of all finite linear orders and all linear orders, as well as the logic of the meets and subinterval relations, over the classes of all and dense linear orders. Together with previous undecidability results, this work contributes to bringing the identification of the dark side of interval temporal logics very close to the definitive picture

Interval temporal logics provide a natural framework for temporal reasoning about interval structures over linearly ordered domains, where intervals are taken as the primitive ontological entities. Their computational behavior mainly depends on two parameters: the set of modalities they feature and the linear orders over which they are interpreted. In this paper, we identify all fragments of Halpern and Shoham's interval temporal logic HS with a decidable satisfiability problem over the class of strongly discrete linear orders as well as over its relevant subclasses (the class of finite linear orders, Z, N, and Z−). We classify them in terms of both their relative expressive power and their complexity, which ranges from NP-completeness to non-primitive recursiveness

Interval logics formalize temporal reasoning on interval structures over linearly (or partially) ordered domains, where time intervals are the primitive ontological entities and truth of formulae is defined relative to time intervals, rather than time points. In this paper, we introduce and study Metric Propositional Neighborhood Logic (MPNL) over natural numbers. MPNL features two modalities referring, respectively, to an interval that is ``met by" the current one and to an interval that ``meets" the current one, plus an infinite set of length constraints, regarded as atomic propositions, to constrain the length of intervals. We argue that MPNL can be successfully used in different areas of computer science to combine qualitative and quantitative interval temporal reasoning, thus providing a viable alternative to well-established logical frameworks such as Duration Calculus. We show that MPNL is decidable in double exponential time and expressively complete with respect to a well-defined sub-fragment of the two-variable fragment FO2[N,=,<,s] of first-order logic for linear orders with successor function, interpreted over natural numbers. Moreover, we show that MPNL can be extended in a natural way to cover full FO2[N,=,<,s], but, unexpectedly, the latter (and hence the former) turns out to be undecidable