The Small Model Property: How Small Can It Be?

Abstract

Efficient decision procedures for equality logic (quantifier-free predicate calculus+the equality sign) are of major importance when proving logical equivalence between systems. We introduce an efficient decision procedure for the theory of equality based on finite instantiations. The main idea is to analyze the structure of the formula and compute accordingly a small domain to each variable such that the formula is satisfiable iff it can be satisfied over these domains. We show how the problem of finding these small domains can be reduced to an interesting graph theoretic problem. This method enabled us to verify formulas containing hundreds of integer and floating point variables that could not be efficiently handled with previously known techniques.