On Approaches to Explaining Infeasibility of Sets of Boolean Clauses

Éric Grégoire (1) , Bertrand Mazure (1) , Cédric Piette (1)

1 CRIL - Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Lens

These last years, the issue of locating and explaining contradictions inside sets of propositional clauses has re- ceived a renewed attention due to the emergence of very efficient SAT solvers. In case of inconsistency, many such solvers merely conclude that no solution exists or provide an upper approximation of the subset of clauses that are contradictory. However, in most application domains, only knowing that a problem does not admit any solution is not enough informative, and it is important to know which clauses are actually conflicting. In this paper, the focus is on the concept of Minimally Unsatisfiable Subformulas (MUSes), which explain logical inconsistency in terms of minimal sets of contradictory clauses. Specifically, various recent results and computational approaches about MUSes and related concepts are discussed.

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]

Éric Grégoire, Bertrand Mazure, Cédric Piette. On Approaches to Explaining Infeasibility of Sets of Boolean Clauses. 20th International Conference on Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI'08), 2008, Dayton, United States. pp.74-83. ⟨hal-00865300⟩