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Towards the Exact Minimization of BDDs—An Elitism-Based Distributed Evolutionary Algorithm

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Abstract

Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) are the state-of-the-art data structure for representation and manipulation of Boolean functions. In general, exact BDD minimization is NP-complete. For BDD-based technology, a small improvement in the number of nodes often simplifies the follow-up problem tremendously. This paper proposes an elitism-based evolutionary algorithm (EBEA) for BDD minimization. It can efficiently find the optimal orderings of variables for all LGSynth91 benchmark circuits with a known minimum size. Moreover, we develop a distributed model of EBEA, DEBEA, which obtains the best-ever variable orders for almost all benchmarks in the LGSynth91. Experimental results show that DEBEA is able to achieve super-linear performance compared to EBEA for some hard benchmarks.

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Correspondence to Shun-Shii Lin.

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Chen, ST., Lin, SS., Huang, LT. et al. Towards the Exact Minimization of BDDs—An Elitism-Based Distributed Evolutionary Algorithm. Journal of Heuristics 10, 337–355 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:HEUR.0000026899.63797.f9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:HEUR.0000026899.63797.f9

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