Exploiting Sparsity in Polyhedral Analysis

The intrinsic cost of polyhedra has lead to research on more tractable sub-classes of linear inequalities. Rather than committing to the precision of such a sub-class, this paper presents a projection algorithm that works directly on any sparse system of inequalities and which sacrifices precision only when necessary. The algorithm is based on a novel combination of the Fourier-Motzkin algorithm (for exact projection) and Simplex (for approximate projection). By reformulating the convex hull operation in terms of projection, conversion to the frame representation is avoided altogether. Experimental results conducted on logic programs demonstrate that the resulting analysis is efficient and precise.