Factored boolean functional synthesis

Abstract

Boolean functional synthesis allows the automated construction of Boolean functions from declarative specifications. BDD-based techniques for this problem can be very efficient when the specification can be compactly represented by a BDD, but this is not always possible. In model checking, a way around this problem has been found by using factored representations, where formulas are represented as a conjunction of subformulas, each encoded individually as a BDD. We show how techniques and heuristics for quantifier elimination on factored formulas can also be lifted to perform synthesis, and show that this approach allows the synthesis of many problem instances that are intractable when represented by a single BDD. We compare our approach to other tools for Boolean synthesis that are not BDD-based. Our empirical evaluation shows that, while no approach dominates across the board, our tool outperforms other tools on several problem instances.