An incremental technique for automata-based decision procedures

Abstract

Automata-based decision procedures commonly achieve optimal complexity bounds. However, in practice, they are often outperformed by sub-optimal (but more local-search based) techniques, such as tableaux, on many practical reasoning problems. This discrepancy is often the result of automata-style techniques global approach to the problem and the consequent need for constructing an extremely large automaton. This is in particular the case when reasoning in theories consisting of large number of relatively simple formulas, such as descriptions of database schemes, is required. In this paper, we propose techniques that allow us to approach a μ-calculus satisfiability problem in an incremental fashion and without the need for re-computation. In addition, we also propose heuristics that guide the problem partitioning in a way that is likely to reduce the size of the problems that need to be solved. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.