This award supports the PI, Mitchell Thornton in a cooperation with Rolf and Nicole Drechsler of the Institute for Information Sciences at the University of Freiburg, Germany. The research focus is on the use of a data structure different from the conventional Decision Diagram for the representation of Boolean functions. The new structure is the AND/OR graph, and it allows for compact functional representation and for the representation of functions whose exact Decision Diagrams might be unworkably large. The U.S. and German groups bring complementary expertise to the project. The Germans have experience in the implementation of decision diagram packages and in alternative decision diagram types. The U.S. group has extensive experience in spectral methods.
