Automated Circuit Diagnosis using First Order Logic Tools

While Numerous Diagnostic Expert Systems Have Been Successfully Developed in Recent Years, They Are Almost Uniformly based on Heuristic Reasoning Techniques (I.e., Shallow Knowledge) in the Form of Rules. This Paper Reports on an Automated Circuit Diagnostic Tool based on Reiter\u27s Theory of Diagnosis. in Particular, this is a Theory of Diagnosis based on Deep Knowledge (I.e., Knowledge based on Certain Design Information) and using First Order Logic as the Representation Language. the Inference Mechanism Which is Incorporated as Part of the Diagnostic Tool is a Refutation based Theorem Prover using Rewriting Systems for Boolean Algebra Developed by Hsiang. Consequently, the Diagnostic Reasoning Tool is Broadly based on Reiter\u27s Model but Incorporates Complete Sets of Reductions for Boolean Algebra to Reason over Equa-Tional Descriptions of the Circuits to Be Analyzed. the Refutational Theorem Prover Uses an Associative Commutative Identity Unification Algorithm Described by Hsiang but Requires Additional Focusing Techniques in Order to Be Appropriate for Diagnosing Circuits. a Prototype Version of the Mainline Diagnostic Program Has Been Developed and Has Been Successfully Demonstrated on Several Small but Nontrivial Combinational Circuit Examples

Boolean Satisfiability in Electronic Design Automation

Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) is often used as the underlying model for a significant and increasing number of applications in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) as well as in many other fields of Computer Science and Engineering. In recent years, new and efficient algorithms for SAT have been developed, allowing much larger problem instances to be solved. SAT “packages” are currently expected to have an impact on EDA applications similar to that of BDD packages since their introduction more than a decade ago. This tutorial paper is aimed at introducing the EDA professional to the Boolean satisfiability problem. Specifically, we highlight the use of SAT models to formulate a number of EDA problems in such diverse areas as test pattern generation, circuit delay computation, logic optimization, combinational equivalence checking, bounded model checking and functional test vector generation, among others. In addition, we provide an overview of the algorithmic techniques commonly used for solving SAT, including those that have seen widespread use in specific EDA applications. We categorize these algorithmic techniques, indicating which have been shown to be best suited for which tasks

Ontology-based data access with databases: a short course

Ontology-based data access (OBDA) is regarded as a key ingredient of the new generation of information systems. In the OBDA paradigm, an ontology defines a high-level global schema of (already existing) data sources and provides a vocabulary for user queries. An OBDA system rewrites such queries and ontologies into the vocabulary of the data sources and then delegates the actual query evaluation to a suitable query answering system such as a relational database management system or a datalog engine. In this chapter, we mainly focus on OBDA with the ontology language OWL 2QL, one of the three profiles of the W3C standard Web Ontology Language OWL 2, and relational databases, although other possible languages will also be discussed. We consider different types of conjunctive query rewriting and their succinctness, different architectures of OBDA systems, and give an overview of the OBDA system Ontop