Solving parity games by a reduction to SAT

This paper presents a reduction from the problem of solving parity games to the satisfiability problem in propositional logic (SAT). The reduction is done in two stages. first into difference logic. i.e. SAT combined with the theory of integer differences, an instance of the SAT modulo theories (SMT) framework. In the second stage the integer variables and constraints of the difference logic encoding are replaced with a set of Boolean variables and constraints on them, giving rise to a pure SAT encoding of the problem. The reduction uses Jurdzinski's characterisation of winning strategies via progress measures. The reduction is motivated by the success of SAT solvers in symbolic verification, bounded model checking in particular. The paper reports on prototype implementations of the reductions and presents some experimental results. (C) 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.