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Searching for Autarkies to Trim Unsatisfiable Clause Sets

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Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing – SAT 2008 (SAT 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 4996))

Abstract

An autarky is a partial assignment to the variables of a Boolean CNF formula that satisfies every clause containing an assigned variable. For an unsatisfiable formula, an autarky provides information about those clauses that are essentially independent from the infeasibility; clauses satisfied by an autarky are not contained in any minimal unsatisfiable subset (MUS) or minimal correction subset (MCS) of clauses. This suggests a preprocessing step of detecting autarkies and trimming such independent clauses from an instance prior to running an algorithm for finding MUSes or MCSes. With little existing work on algorithms for finding autarkies or experimental evaluations thereof, there is room for further research in this area. Here, we present a novel algorithm that searches for autarkies directly using a standard satisfiability solver. We investigate the autarkies of several industrial benchmark suites, and experimental results show that our algorithm compares favorably to an existing approach for discovering autarkies. Finally, we explore the potential of trimming autarkies in MCS- or MUS-extraction flows.

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Hans Kleine Büning Xishun Zhao

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Liffiton, M., Sakallah, K. (2008). Searching for Autarkies to Trim Unsatisfiable Clause Sets. In: Kleine Büning, H., Zhao, X. (eds) Theory and Applications of Satisfiability Testing – SAT 2008. SAT 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4996. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79719-7_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-79719-7_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-79718-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-79719-7

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