Deductive diagnosis of digital circuits

Abstract

In this paper we present an efficient deductive method for addressing combinational circuit diagnosis problems. The method resorts to bottom-up dependencies propagation, where truth-values are annotated with sets of faults. We compare it with several other logic programming techniques, starting with a naïve generate-and-test algorithm, and proceeding with a simple Prolog backtracking search. An approach using tabling is also studied, based on an abductive approach. For the sake of completeness, we also address the same problem with Answer Set Programming. Our tests recur to the ISCAS85 circuit benchmarks suite, although the technique is generalized to systems modelled by a set of propositional rules. The dependency-directed method outperforms others by orders of magnitude. © 2004 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc.