Dr Nils Froleyks Postdoc

Certification was made mandatory for the first time in the latest hardware model checking competition. In this case study, we investigate the trade-offs of requiring certificates for both passing and failing properties in the competition. Our evaluation shows that participating model checkers were able to produce compact, correct certificates that could be verified with minimal overhead. Furthermore, the certifying winner of the competition outperforms the previous non-certifying state-of-the-art model checker, demonstrating that certification can be adopted without compromising model checking efficiency.

The SAT Competitions constitute a well-established series of yearly open international algorithm implementation competitions, focusing on the Boolean satisfiability (or propositional satisfiability, SAT) problem. In this article, we provide a detailed account on the 2020 instantiation of the SAT Competition, including the new competition tracks and benchmark selection procedures, overview of solving strategies implemented in top-performing solvers, and a detailed analysis of the empirical data obtained from running the competition.

We extend the well-established assumption-based interface of incremental SAT solvers to clauses, allowing the addition of a temporary clause that has the same lifespan as literal assumptions. Our approach is efficient and easy to implement in modern CDCL-based solvers. Compared to previous approaches, it does not come with any memory overhead and does not slow down the solver due to disabled activation literals, thus eliminating the need for algorithms like IC3 to restart the SAT solver. All clauses learned under literal and clause assumptions are safe to keep and not implicitly invalidated for containing an activation literal. These changes increase the quality of learned clauses, resulting in better generalization for IC3. We implement the extension in the SAT solver CaDiCaL and evaluate it with the IC3 implementation in the model checker ABC. Our experiments on the benchmarks from a recent hardware model checking competition show a speedup for the average SAT call and a reduction in number of calls per verification instance, resulting in a substantial improvement in model checking time.

The SAT solver CaDiCaL provides a rich feature set with a clean library interface. It has been adopted by many users, is well documented and easy to extend due to its effective testing and debugging infrastructure. In this tool paper we give a high-level introduction into the solver architecture and then go briefly over implemented techniques. We describe basic features and novel advanced usage scenarios. Experiments confirm that CaDiCaL despite this flexibility has state-of-the-art performance both in a stand-alone as well as incremental setting.