Using Extended Logical Primitives for Efficient BDD Building

Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) have been used to represent logic models in a variety of research contexts, such as software product lines, circuit testing, and plasma confinement, among others. Although BDDs have proven to be very useful, the main problem with this technique is that synthesizing BDDs can be a frustratingly slow or even unsuccessful process, due to its heuristic nature. We present an extension of propositional logic to tackle one recurring phenomenon in logic modeling, namely groups of variables related by an exclusive-or relationship, and also consider two other extensions: one in which at least n variables in a group are true and another one for in which at most n variables are true. We add XOR, atLeast-n and atMost-n primitives to logic formulas in order to reduce the size of the input and also present algorithms to efficiently incorporate these constructions into the building of BDDs. We prove, among other results, that the number of nodes created during the process for XOR groups is reduced from quadratic to linear for the affected clauses. the XOR primitive is tested against eight logical models, two from industry and six from Kconfig-based open-source projects. Results range from no negative effects in models without XOR relations to performance gains well into two orders of magnitude on models with an abundance of this kind of relationship.