Comparative Analysis on CNF Encodings for Boolean Cardinality Constraints

BCC(Boolean Cardinality Constraint) is to select one boolean variable from n different variables. It is widely used in many areas including software engineering. Thus, many efficient encoding techniques of BCC into CNF have been studied extensively In this paper we analyze some representative encodings with respect to flexibility as well as efficiency. In addition we use a visualization tool to draw the CNF clauses generated from each encodings. Visualizing the clauses exposes a hidden structure in encodings and makes to compare each encodings on the structure level, which is one of the prominent achievement in our work compared to other works. And we apply our analysis on the pigeon-hole problems to have confidence. In our experimental settings, the commander encoding shows the best performance.