Accelerating LTL satisfiability checking by SAT solvers

Satisfiability checking for Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is a fundamental step in checking for possible errors in LTL assertions. Extant LTL satisfiability checkers use a variety of different search procedures. In this paper, we propose an LTL satisfiability-checking framework that is accelerated by leveraging the state-of-the-art Boolean SAT techniques. Our approach is based on the variant of the obligation-set method, which we proposed in earlier work. We describe here heuristics that allow the use of a Boolean SAT solver to analyse the obligations for a given LTL formula. Moreover, we show the heuristics can be also utilized as the preprocessor for every LTL satisfiability solver. The experimental evaluation indicates that the new approach provides a significant performance improvement compared to its previous version, and becomes competitive with other state-of-the-art solvers.