We show that the satisfiability problem for the "symbolic heap" fragment of separation logic with general inductively defined predicates -which includes most fragments employed in program verification -is decidable. Our decision procedure is based on the computation of a certain fixed point from the definition of an inductive predicate, called its "base", that exactly characterises its satisfiability.A complexity analysis of our decision procedure shows that it runs, in the worst case, in exponential time. In fact, we show that the satisfiability problem for our inductive predicates is EXPTIMEcomplete, and becomes NP-complete when the maximum arity over all predicates is bounded by a constant.Finally, we provide an implementation of our decision procedure, and analyse its performance both on a synthetically generated set of test formulas, and on a second test set harvested from the separation logic literature. For the large majority of these test cases, our tool reports times in the low milliseconds.

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Abstract. Logical reasoning about program data often requires dealing with heap structures as well as scalar data types. Recent advances in Satisfiability Modular Theory (SMT) already offer efficient procedures for dealing with scalars, yet they lack any support for dealing with heap structures. In this paper, we present an approach that integrates Separation Logic-a prominent logic for reasoning about list segments on the heap-and SMT. We follow a model-based approach that communicates aliasing among heap cells between the SMT solver and the Separation Logic reasoning part. An experimental evaluation using the Z3 solver indicates that our approach can effectively put to work the advances in SMT for dealing with heap structures. This is the first decision procedure for the combination of separation logic with SMT theories.

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