From Tableau-based to Sat-based Procedures | Preliminary Report

Tableau systems are very popular in AI for their simplicity and versatility. In recent papers we showed that tableau-based procedures are intrinsically ineecient, and proposed an alternative approach of building decision procedures on top of SAT decision procedure. We called this approach \SAT-based". In extensive empirical tests on the case study of modal K, a SAT-based procedure drastically outperformed a state-of-the-art tableau-based system. In this paper we provide the theoretical foundations for developing SAT-based decision procedures for many diierent modal logics.