Technical Report: Time-Bounded Resilience

Most research on formal system design has focused on optimizing various measures of efficiency. However, insufficient attention has been given to the design of systems optimizing resilience, the ability of systems to adapt to unexpected changes or adversarial disruptions. In our prior work, we formalized the intuitive notion of resilience as a property of cyber-physical systems by using a multiset rewriting language with explicit time. In the present work, we study the computational complexity of a formalization of time-bounded resilience problems for the class of progressing timed systems (PTS), where, intuitively, only a finite number of actions can be carried out in a bounded time period. We show that, in the time-bounded model with n (potentially adversarially chosen) updates, the corresponding time-bounded resilience problem is complete for the $\Sigma^P_{2n+1}$ class of the polynomial hierarchy, PH. To support the formal models and complexity results, we perform automated experiments for time-bounded verification using the rewriting logic tool Maude.