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SAT-based explicit LTL reasoning and its application to satisfiability checking

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Abstract

We present here a new explicit reasoning framework for linear temporal logic (LTL), which is built on top of propositional satisfiability (SAT) solving. The crux of our approach is a construction of temporal transition system that is based on SAT-solving rather than tableau to construct states and transitions. As a proof-of-concept of this framework, we describe a new LTL satisfiability algorithm. We tested the effectiveness of this approach by demonstrating that it significantly outperforms all existing LTL-satisfiability-checking algorithms.

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Notes

  1. See http://www.satcompetition.org/.

  2. It can be downloaded at www.lab301.cn/aalta.

  3. Although a most recent tableau-based solver has been presented in [1], our preliminary results show its performance is at least 10 times worse than Aalta_2.0. As a result, we rule out the comparison with this work.

  4. http://patterns.projects.cis.ksu.edu/documentation/patterns/ltl.shtml.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank anonymous reviewers for useful comments. The work is supported in part by NSF Grants CCF-1319459, by NSF Expeditions in Computing project “ExCAPE: Expeditions in Computer Augmented Program Engineering”, and by BSF Grant 9800096. Jianwen Li is partially supported by NSFC Projects No. 61572197 and No. 61632005. Geguang Pu is partially supported by MOST NKTSP Project 2015BAG19G02 (Grant No. ZF1213) and STCSM Project No. 16DZ1100600. Lijun Zhang is supported by NSFC Grant No. 61532019.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rice University, Houston, USA

    Jianwen Li & Moshe Y. Vardi

  2. East China Normal University, Shanghai, China

    Shufang Zhu & Geguang Pu

  3. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Lijun Zhang

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  1. Jianwen Li
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  2. Shufang Zhu
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Correspondence to Geguang Pu.

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Li, J., Zhu, S., Pu, G. et al. SAT-based explicit LTL reasoning and its application to satisfiability checking. Form Methods Syst Des 54, 164–190 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10703-018-00326-5

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