# Local Redundancy in SAT: Generalizations of Blocked Clauses

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a semantic and syntactic framework for local redundancy properties in SAT, generalizing blocked clauses, with theoretical characterizations and complexity analysis.

## Contribution

It presents the most general local redundancy property via semantic blocking and introduces set-blocking and super-blocking notions, expanding the understanding of clause elimination.

## Key findings

- Semantic blocking is the most general local redundancy property.
- Super-blocking coincides with semantic blocking.
- Complexity analysis of new redundancy properties.

## Abstract

Clause-elimination procedures that simplify formulas in conjunctive normal form play an important role in modern SAT solving. Before or during the actual solving process, such procedures identify and remove clauses that are irrelevant to the solving result. These simplifications usually rely on so-called redundancy properties that characterize cases in which the removal of a clause does not affect the satisfiability status of a formula. One particularly successful redundancy property is that of blocked clauses, because it generalizes several other redundancy properties. To find out whether a clause is blocked---and therefore redundant---one only needs to consider its resolution environment, i.e., the clauses with which it can be resolved. For this reason, we say that the redundancy property of blocked clauses is local. In this paper, we show that there exist local redundancy properties that are even more general than blocked clauses. We present a semantic notion of blocking and prove that it constitutes the most general local redundancy property. We furthermore introduce the syntax-based notions of set-blocking and super-blocking, and show that the latter coincides with our semantic blocking notion. In addition, we show how semantic blocking can be alternatively characterized via Davis and Putnam's rule for eliminating atomic formulas. Finally, we perform a detailed complexity analysis and relate our novel redundancy properties to prominent redundancy properties from the literature.