Experiments on the feasibility of using a floating-point simplex in an SMT solver

10 pages•Published: August 19, 2013

Diego Caminha Barbosa de Oliveira and David Monniaux

Abstract

SMT solvers use simplex-based decision procedures to solve decision problems whose formulas are quantifier-free and atoms are linear constraints over the rationals. State-of-art SMT solvers use rational (exact) simplex implementations, which have shown good performance for typical software, hardware or protocol verification problems over the years.
Yet, most other scientific and technical fields use (inexact) floating-point computations, which are deemed far more efficient than exact ones.
It is therefore tempting to use a floating-point simplex implementation inside an SMT solver, though special precautions must be taken to avoid unsoundness.

In this work, we describe experimental results, over common benchmarks (SMT-LIB) of the integration of a mature floating-point implementation of the simplex algorithm (GLPK) into an existing SMT solver (OpenSMT).
We investigate whether commonly cited reasons for and against the use of floating-point truly apply to real cases from verification problems.

Keyphrases: automated reasoning, floating point, satisfiability modulo theories, simplex, smt solving

In: Pascal Fontaine, Renate A. Schmidt and Stephan Schulz (editors). PAAR-2012. Third Workshop on Practical Aspects of Automated Reasoning, vol 21, pages 19-28.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/NqS
	https://doi.org/10.29007/j7x4

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{PAAR-2012:Experiments_feasibility_using_floating,
  author    = {Diego Caminha Barbosa de Oliveira and David Monniaux},
  title     = {Experiments on the feasibility of using a floating-point simplex in an SMT solver},
  booktitle = {PAAR-2012. Third Workshop on Practical Aspects of Automated Reasoning},
  editor    = {Pascal Fontaine and Renate A. Schmidt and Stephan Schulz},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Computing},
  volume    = {21},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2398-7340},
  url       = {/publications/paper/NqS},
  doi       = {10.29007/j7x4},
  pages     = {19-28},
  year      = {2013}}

Download PDF Open PDF in browser