Tractable and Intractable Entailment Problems in Separation Logic with Inductively Defined Predicates

Abstract: We establish various complexity results for the entailment problem between formulas in Separation Logic with user-defined predicates denoting recursive data structures. The considered fragments are characterized by syntactic conditions on the inductive rules that define the semantics of the predicates. We focus on so-called P-rules, which are similar to (but simpler than) the PCE rules introduced by Iosif et al. in 2013. In particular, for a specific fragment where predicates are defined by so-called loc-deterministic inductive rules, we devise a sound and complete cyclic proof procedure running in polynomial time. Several complexity lower bounds are provided, showing that any relaxing of the provided conditions makes the problem intractable.