Faster SAT solving with better CNF generation

Abstract

Boolean satisfiability (SAT) solving has become an enabling technology with wide-ranging applications in numerous disciplines. These applications tend to be most naturally encoded using arbitrary Boolean expressions, but to use modern SAT solvers, one has to generate expressions in Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF). This process can significantly affect SAT solving times. In this paper, we introduce a new linear-time CNF generation algorithm. We have implemented our algorithm and have conducted extensive experiments, which show that our algorithm leads to faster SAT solving times and smaller CNF than existing approaches.