A New Algebraic Tool for Automatic Theorem Provers

The concepts of implicates and implicants are widely used in several fields of “Automated Reasoning”. Particularly, our research group has developed several techniques that allow us to reduce efficiently the size of the input, and therefore the complexity of the problem. These techniques are based on obtaining and using implicit information that is collected in terms of unitary implicates and implicants. Thus, we require efficient algorithms to calculate them. In classical propositional logic it is easy to obtain efficient algorithms to calculate the set of unitary implicants and implicates of a formula. In temporal logics, contrary to what we see in classical propositional logic, these sets may contain infinitely many members. Thus, in order to calculate them in an efficient way, we have to base the calculation on the theoretical study of how these sets behave. Such a study reveals the need to make a generalization of Lattice Theory, which is very important in “Computational Algebra”. In this paper we introduce the multisemilattice structure as a generalization of the semilattice structure. Such a structure is proposed as a particular type of poset. Subsequently, we offer an equivalent algebraic characterization based on non-deterministic operators and with a weakly associative property. We also show that from the structure of multisemilattice we can obtain an algebraic characterization of the multilattice structure. This paper concludes by showing the relevance of the multisemilattice structure in the design of algorithms aimed at calculating unitary implicates and implicants in temporal logics. Concretely, we show that it is possible to design efficient algorithms to calculate the unitary implicants/implicates only if the unitary formulae set has the multisemilattice structure.