Symbolic verification of boolean constraints over partially specified functions

Sriram S., R. Tandon, P.Dasgupta, P.P. Chakrabarti

Incomplete or partial specifications arise out of mistakes in design, or in purpose to avoid loss of generality in application. When designing a system with several partially specified functions, we often impose constraints on the global behavior of the system. In this paper, we study the problem of verifying whether a set of partially specified functions meets such constraints. We show that the problem is $\Pi_2^P$ complete. While symbolic BDD-based algorithms have been widely used for propositional satisfiability ($\Sigma_1^P$ complete) and validity ($\Pi_1^P$ complete) problems, the structure of BDDs is not natural for solving $\Pi_2^P$ complete problems. We present a two-step BDD-based method for solving the above $\Pi_2^P$ complete problem and show that the method is effective when the number of functions is small.

In IEEE Symp. on Circ. and Systems (ISCAS), May 2001, Sydney, Australia.


Sriram Sankaranarayanan