Closing a Gap in the Complexity of Refinement Modal Logic

Abstract: Refinement Modal Logic (RML), which was recently introduced by Bozzelli et al., is an extension of classical modal logic which allows one to reason about a changing model. In this paper we study computational complexity questions related to this logic, settling a number of open problems. Specifically, we study the complexity of satisfiability for the existential fragment of RML, a problem posed by Bozzelli, van Ditmarsch and Pinchinat. Our main result is a tight PSPACE upper bound for this problem, which we achieve by introducing a new tableau system. As a direct consequence, we obtain a tight characterization of the complexity of RML satisfiability for any fixed number of alternations of refinement quantifiers. Additionally, through a simple reduction we establish that the model checking problem for RML is PSPACE-complete, even for formulas with a single quantifier.