A neighborhood decoupling algorithm for truncated sum minimization

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISMVL.1990.122611Published in: Proceedings of the Twentieth International Symposium on Multiple-Valued LogicThere has been considerable interest in heuristic method for minimizing multiple-valued logic functions because exact methods are intractable. This paper describes a new heuristic, called the neighborhood decoupling (ND) algorithm. It first selects a minterm and then selects an implicant, a two step process employed in previous heuristics, e.g., Besslich [2] and Dueck and Miller [4]. The approach taken here more closely resembles the Dueck and Miller heuristic; however, it makes more efficient use of minterms truncated to the highest logic value. The ND-algorithm was developed in conjunction with HAMLET [12], a computer software created at the Naval Postgraduate School for the purpose of designing heuristics for multiple-valued logic minimization. In this paper, we present the algorithm, discuss the implementation, show that it performs consistently better than others and explain the reason for its improved performance