In today’s world, people are using more and more digital systems in daily life. Such systems utilize the elementariness of Boolean values. A Boolean variable can carry only two different Boolean values: FALSE or TRUE (0 or 1), and has the best interference resistance in technical systems. However, a Boolean function exponentially depends on the number of its variables. This exponential complexity is the cause of major problems in the process of design and realization of circuits. According to Moore’s Law, the complexity of digital systems approximately doubles every 18 months. This requires comprehensive knowledge and techniques to solve very complex Boolean problems. This book summarizes the recent progress in the Boolean domain in solving such issues. Part 1 describes the most powerful approaches in solving exceptionally complex Boolean problems. It is shown how an extremely rare solution could be found in a gigantic search space of more than 10^195 (this is a number of 196 decimal digits) different color patterns. Part 2 describes new research into digital circuits that realize Boolean functions. This part contains the chapters “Design” and “Test”, which present solutions to problems of power dissipation, and the testing of digital circuits using a special data structure, as well as further topics. Part 3 contributes to the scientific basis of future circuit technologies, investigating the need for completely new design methods for the atomic level of quantum computers. This section also concerns itself with circuit structures in reversible logic as the basis for quantum logic.

The Internet of Things is a great new challenge for the development of digital systems. In addition to the increasing number of classical unconnected digital systems, more people are regularly using new electronic devices and software that are controllable and usable by means of the internet. All such systems utilize the elementariness of Boolean values. A Boolean variable can carry only two different Boolean values: FALSE or TRUE (0 or 1), and has the best interference resistance in technical systems. However, a Boolean function exponentially depends on the number of its variables. This exponential complexity is the cause of major problems in the process of design and realization of circuits. According to Moore’s Law, the complexity of digital systems approximately doubles every 18 months. This requires comprehensive knowledge and techniques to solve complex Boolean problems. This book summarizes both new problems and solutions in the Boolean domain in solving such issues. Part 1 describes powerful new approaches in solving exceptionally complex Boolean problems. Efficient methods contribute to solving problems of extreme complexity. New algorithms and programs utilize the huge number of computing cores of the Graphical Processing Unit and improve the performance of calculations by several orders of magnitude. Part 2 represents several applications of digital systems. Due to the crucial role of the internet, both solutions and open problems regarding the security of these systems are discussed. The exploration of certain properties of such systems leads to a number of efficient solutions, which can be reused in a wide field of applications. Part 3 discusses the scientific basis of future circuit technologies, investigating the need for completely new design methods for the atomic level of quantum computers. This part also concerns itself with reversible circuits as the basis for quantum circuits and specifies important issues regarding future improvements.

The amount of digital systems supporting our daily life is increasing continuously. Improved technical facilities for their production have led to growing challenges for engineers and scientists working in the Boolean domain. A Boolean variable can only carry two different Boolean values: FALSE or TRUE (0 or 1), and has the best interference resistance in technical systems. However, a Boolean function exponentially depends on the number of its variables. This exponential complexity is the reason for major problems in the process of design and realization of circuits. According to Moore’s Law, the complexity of digital systems approximately doubles every 18 months. This requires comprehensive knowledge and techniques to solve very complex Boolean problems. This volume represents the third book in a series that provides further insights into the Boolean domain. Part 1 explores powerful models, methods and techniques which improve the efficiency in solving Boolean problems of extreme complexity. The universality of Boolean equations as a model to solve Non-deterministic Polynomial-time (NP) hard problems, as well as special properties of index generation functions, spectral techniques, or relational approaches, is discussed here. Both hardware devices, such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) or Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), and optimized algorithms realized in software contribute to the acceleration of Boolean calculations. Part 2 contributes to the synthesis and visualization of digital circuits, and provides interesting new solutions for several types of circuits. A comprehensive collection of benchmarks supports the evolution of both existing and new synthesis approaches. The continuous reduction of the size of the transistors increases the challenges with regard to the reliability of the circuits. Part 3 describes several new approaches for the synthesis of reversible circuits. These approaches, as well as a classification of reversible functions, extend the basis of future quantum computers.

This book gathers together the results of research on the Boolean domain related to important real-life applications that will support the reader in solving their scientific and practical tasks. It highlights that ongoing digitalization leads to increasing amounts of complex applications, the digits of which are usually encoded by Boolean variables due to their simplicity as only two values are used. However, as shown here, an exponentially growing number of vectors of Boolean variables can negate this simplicity, which leads to challenges in advancing progress in the Boolean domain and supporting a wide range of applications.

"Somewhere, there is always wind blowing or the sun shining." This maxim could lead the global shift from fossil to renewable energy sources, suggesting that there is enough energy available to be turned into electricity. But the already impressive numbers that are available today, along with the European Union's 20-20-20 goal – to power 20% of the EU energy consumption from renewables until 2020 –, might mislead us over the problem that the go-to renewables readily available rely on a primary energy source mankind cannot control: the weather. At the same time, the notion of the smart grid introduces a vast array of new data coming from sensors in the power grid, at wind farms, power plants, transformers, and consumers. The new wealth of information might seem overwhelming, but can help to manage the different actors in the power grid. This book proposes to view the problem of power generation and distribution in the face of increased volatility as a problem of information distribution and processing. It enhances the power grid by turning its nodes into agents that forecast their local power balance from historical data, using artificial neural networks and the multi-part evolutionary training algorithm described in this book. They pro-actively communicate power demand and supply, adhering to a set of behavioral rules this book defines, and finally solve the 0-1 knapsack problem of choosing offers in such a way that not only solves the disequilibrium, but also minimizes line loss, by elegant modeling in the Boolean domain. The book shows that the Divide-et-Impera approach of a distributed grid control can lead to an efficient, reliable integration of volatile renewable energy sources into the power grid.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on NASA Formal Methods, NFM 2012, held in Norfolk, VA, USA, in April 2012. The 36 revised regular papers presented together with 10 short papers, 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 93 submissions. The topics are organized in topical sections on theorem proving, symbolic execution, model-based engineering, real-time and stochastic systems, model checking, abstraction and abstraction refinement, compositional verification techniques, static and dynamic analysis techniques, fault protection, cyber security, specification formalisms, requirements analysis and applications of formal techniques.

This book describes recent findings in the domain of Boolean logic and Boolean algebra, covering application domains in circuit and system design, but also basic research in mathematics and theoretical computer science. Content includes invited chapters and a selection of the best papers presented at the 14th annual International Workshop on Boolean Problems.