From KSAT to Delayed Theory Combination: Exploiting DPLL Outside the SAT Domain

In the last two decades we have witnessed an impressive advance in the efficiency of propositional satisfiability techniques (SAT), which has brought large and previously-intractable problems at the reach of state-of-the-art SAT solvers. Most of this success is motivated by the impressive level of efficiency reached by current implementations of the DPLL procedure. Plain propositional logic, however, is not the only application domain for DPLL. In fact, DPLL has also been successfully used as a boolean-reasoning kernel for automated reasoning tools in much more expressive logics. In this talk I overview a 12-year experience on integrating DPLL with logic-specific decision procedures in various domains. In particular, I present and discuss three main achievements which have been obtained in this context: the DPLL-based procedures for modal and description logics, the lazy approach to Satisfiability Modulo Theories, and Delayed Theory Combination.