Decidability of the interval temporal logic ABB* over the natural numbers

In this paper, we focus our attention on the interval temporal logic of the Allen's relations "meets", "begins", and "begun by" (ABBbar for short), interpreted over natural numbers. We first introduce the logic and we show that it is expressive enough to model distinctive interval properties, such as accomplishment conditions, to capture basic modalities of point-based temporal logic, such as the until operator, and to encode relevant metric constraints. Then, we prove that the satisfiability problem for ABBbar over natural numbers is decidable by providing a small model theorem based on an original contraction method. Finally, we prove the EXPSPACE-completeness of the problem.