Implicit Computation of Filtered Prime Implicants

Abstract

Prime implicants (PIs) are central in computer science, with applications in logic minimization, diagnosis, explainable formal methods and AI. Algorithms for the computation of PIs were first-and-foremost considered on the full input space, not considering the case where the input space might be constrained by context or structural dependencies. To filter out those PIs that do not fulfill the constraints, existing methods rely on an explicit post-processing step after computing all PIs, which leads to scalability issues due to the number of PIs being exponential. We propose end-to-end symbolic algorithms that implicitly represent the set of PIs under side constraints. For this, we extend the prominent Coudert-Madre method based on decision diagrams and implement a modular tool chain that separates decision-diagram construction, PI computation, and filtering.