Refining the SAT decision ordering for bounded model checking

Bounded Model Checking (BMC) relies on solving a sequence of highly correlated Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problems, each of which checks for the existence of counter-examples of a bounded length. The performance of SAT search depends heavily on the variable decision ordering. We propose an algorithm to exploit the correlation among different SAT problems in BMC, by predicting and successively refining a partial variable ordering. This ordering is based on the analysis of all previous unsatisfiable instances, and is combined with the SAT solver's existing decision heuristic to determine the final variable decision ordering. Experiments on real designs from industry show that our new method improves the performance of SAT-based BMC significantly.