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Accelerating Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solving by common subclause elimination

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Abstract

Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) is an important problem in many domains. Modern SAT solvers have been widely used in important industrial applications including automated planning and verification. To solve more problems in real applications, new techniques are needed to speed up SAT solving. Inspired by the success of common subexpression elimination in programming languages and other related areas, we study the impact of common subclause elimination (CSE) on SAT solving. Intensive experiments on many SAT solvers and benchmarks with 48-h timeout show that CSE can consistently improve SAT solving. Up to 5% more SAT13 instances can be solved after CSE. LZW-based CSE shows the best overall performance, particularly in the category of application benchmarks. A potential use of this result is that one may consider the heuristic of applying CSE to boost SAT solver performance on real life applications. Because of many possible ways to improve the benefit of CSE, we hope future research can unleash the full potential of CSE in SAT solving.

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Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the feedback from anonymous reviewers. Bao’s work in this paper is partially sponsored by NSF MCB-1616216. Zhang’s work in this paper is partially sponsored by NSF IIS-1018031 and CNS-1359359.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Akron, Akron, OH, 44325, USA

    Forrest Sheng Bao

  2. Amazon Web Services, Inc., 410 Terry Avenue, North Seattle, WA, 98109, USA

    Chris Gutierrez

  3. Department of Computer Science, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, 79409, USA

    Jeriah Jn Charles-Blount & Yuanlin Zhang

  4. College of Information Science and Technology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Yaowei Yan

Authors
  1. Forrest Sheng Bao
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  2. Chris Gutierrez
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  3. Jeriah Jn Charles-Blount
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  4. Yaowei Yan
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  5. Yuanlin Zhang
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Correspondence to Forrest Sheng Bao.

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Bao, F.S., Gutierrez, C., Jn Charles-Blount, J. et al. Accelerating Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solving by common subclause elimination. Artif Intell Rev 49, 439–453 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-016-9530-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-016-9530-6

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