Lecture: Satisfiability checking

Important Facts
Lecture Times: Thursday, 12:15 – 13:45, AH 6
Friday, 12:15 – 13:45, AH 6
First Lecture: Obtober 22, 2015
Language: English or German (depending on the students’ preferences)
Exam: written
Prerequisites: for Bachelor or Master (“Wahlpflicht” in Theoretical Computer Science)
Basic knowledge about algorithms is required.
Credit Points: 6
First Exam: 05.03.2016, 10:00 – 12:00, Fo1 / Fo2
Revision: 14.03.2016, 13:00 – 16:00, AH 1
Second Exam: 02.04.2016, 10:00 – 12:00, PPS HI / PPS HII
Prevision: 08.04.2016, 10:00 – 12:00, AH 1

News and materials can be found in the corresponding L2P learning room. For additional information see also the Campus page.

Motivation

Different approaches in computer science involve tools (solvers) to check whether certain formulas are satisfiable. Examples can be found in the fields of hardware and software verification, counterexample generation, termination analysis of programs, and optimization algorithms, just to mention a few.

In this lecture we deal with the automatic check of satisfiability of formulas from different logics. Formulas of propositional logic can be checked for satisfiability using SAT-solvers (SAT=”satisfiability”). Extending the logic with different theories leads us to SMT-solvers (SMT=”satisfiability modulo theories”). During the semester we will discuss extensions of propositional logic with equalities, uninterpreted functions, and linear and non-linear constraints involving real- and integer-valued variables (linear/non-linear real/integer arithmetic). To demonstrate practical relevance, we employ the above methods in the context of bounded model checking.

Materials

For learning you can use the book

Daniel Kroening and Ofer Strichman: Decision Procedures: An Algorithmic Point of View, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2008.

which is available in the computer science library, the lecture slides and the lecture notes that will be made available in the L2P learning room.

The slides from last year are available here.

Evaluations of past years