Covered Clause Elimination

Abstract

Generalizing the novel clause elimination procedures developed in [M. Heule, M. J\"arvisalo, and A. Biere. Clause elimination procedures for CNF formulas. In Proc. LPAR-17, volume 6397 of LNCS, pages 357-371. Springer, 2010.], we introduce explicit (CCE), hidden (HCCE), and asymmetric (ACCE) variants of a procedure that eliminates covered clauses from CNF formulas. We show that these procedures are more effective in reducing CNF formulas than the respective variants of blocked clause elimination, and may hence be interesting as new preprocessing/simplification techniques for SAT solving.