Minimization of Boolean relations

The authors present a Quine-McCluskey-like method for the minimization of Boolean relations. They develop the notion of prime implications for Boolean relations and give a procedure for generating all primes. Using these primes, the minimization problem is formulated as a linear integer (0-1) program with a special structure. The authors show that this can be solved as a binate covering problem. The notions of essential and of row and column dominance are presented as bounding techniques for solving this covering problem using a branch-and-bound method.<<ETX>>