Restructuring and simplifying rule bases.

Rule bases are commonly acquired, by expert and/or knowledge engineer, in a form which is well suited for acquisition purposes. When the knowledge base is executed, however, a different structure may be required. Moreover, since human experts normally do not provide the knowledge in compact chunks, rule bases often suffer from redundancy. This may considerably harm efficiency. In this paper a procedure is examined to transform rules that are specified in the knowledge acquisition process into an efficient rule base by way of decision tables. This transformation algorithms allows the generation of a minimal rule representation of the knowledge, and verification and optimization of rule bases and other specification (e.g. legal texts, procedural descriptions, ...). The proposed procedures are fully supported by the PROLOGA tool.

Polynomial-time algorithms for generation of prime implicants

AbstractA notion of a neighborhood cube of a term of a Boolean function represented in the canonical disjunctive normal form is introduced. A relation between neighborhood cubes and prime implicants of a Boolean function is established. Various aspects of the problem of prime implicants generation are identified and neighborhood cube-based algorithms for their solution are developed. The correctness of algorithms is proven and their time complexity is analyzed. It is shown that all presented algorithms are polynomial in the number of minterms occurring in the canonical disjunctive normal form representation of a Boolean function. A summary of the known approaches to the solution of the problem of the generation of prime implicants is also included

Efficient state reduction methods for PLA-based sequential circuits

Experiences with heuristics for the state reduction of finite-state machines are presented and two new heuristic algorithms described in detail. Results on machines from the literature and from the MCNC benchmark set are shown. The area of the PLA implementation of the combinational component and the design time are used as figures of merit. The comparison of such parameters, when the state reduction step is included in the design process and when it is not, suggests that fast state-reduction heuristics should be implemented within FSM automatic synthesis systems

Incremental polynomial time dualization of quadratic functions and a subclass of degree-k functions

Cataloged from PDF version of article.We consider the problem of dualizing a Boolean function f represented by a DNF. In its most general form, this problem is commonly believed not to be solvable by a quasi-polynomial total time algorithm.We show that if the input DNF is quadratic or is a special degree-k DNF, then dualization turns out to be equivalent to hypergraph dualization in hypergraphs of bounded degree and hence it can be achieved in incremental polynomial time