Relevance for SAT(ID)

Inductive definitions and justifications are well-studied concepts. Solvers that support inductive definitions have been developed, but several of their computationally nice properties have never been exploited to improve these solvers. In this paper, we present a new notion called relevance. We determine a class of literals that are relevant for a given definition and partial interpretation, and show that choices on irrelevant atoms can never benefit the search for a model. We propose an early stopping criterion and a modification of existing heuristics that exploit relevance. We present a first implementation in MinisatID and experimentally evaluate our approach, and study how often existing solvers make choices on irrelevant atoms.