The best a monitor can do

Abstract

Existing notions of monitorability for branching-time properties are fairly restrictive. This, in turn, impacts the ability to incorporate prior knowledge about the system under scrutiny - which corresponds to a branching-time property - into the runtime analysis. We propose a definition of optimal monitors that verify the best monitorable under- or over-approximation of a specification, regardless of its monitorability status. Optimal monitors can be obtained for arbitrary branching-time properties by synthesising a sound and complete monitor for their strongest monitorable consequence. We show that the strongest monitorable consequence of specifications expressed in Hennessy-Milner logic with recursion is itself expressible in this logic, and present a procedure to find it. Our procedure enables prior knowledge to be optimally incorporated into runtime monitors.