In the automotive industry, the compilation and maintenance of correct product configuration data is a complex task. Our work shows how formal methods can be applied to the validation of such business critical data. Our consistency support tool BIS works on an existing database of Boolean constraints expressing valid configurations and their transformation into manufacturable products. Using a specially modified satisfiability checker with an explanation component, BIS can detect inconsistencies in the constraints set and thus help increase the quality of the product data. BIS also supports manufacturing decisions by calculating the implications of product or production environment changes on the set of required parts. In this paper, we give a comprehensive account of BIS: the formalization of the business processes underlying its construction, the modifications of satisfiability-checking technology we found necessary in this context, and the software technology used to package the product as a client-server information system.
We present PaSAT, a parallel implementation of a Davis-Putnam-style propositional satisfiability checker incorporating dynamic search space partitioning, intelligent backjumping, as well as lemma generation and exchange; the main focus of our implementation is on speeding up SAT-checking of propositional encodings of real-world combinatorial problems. We investigate and analyze the speed-ups obtained by parallelization in conjunction with lemma exchange and describe the effects we observed during our experiments. Finally, we present performance measurements from the application of our prover in the areas of formal consistency checking of industrial product documentation, cryptanalysis, and hardware verification.
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