The modal logic of copy and remove

Abstract

We propose a logic with the dynamic modal operators copy and remove. The copy operator replicates a given model, and the remove operator removes paths in a given model. We show that the product update by an action model in dynamic epistemic logic decomposes in copy and remove operations, when we consider action models with Boolean pre-conditions and no post-condition. We also show that copy and remove operators with paths of length 1 can be expressed by action models with post-conditions. We investigate the expressive power of the logic with copy and remove operations, together with the complexity of the satisfiability problem of some of its syntactic fragments.