Ordered Functional Decision Diagrams: A Functional Semantics For Binary Decision Diagrams

Abstract: We introduce a novel framework, termed $\lambda$DD, that revisits Binary Decision Diagrams from a purely functional point of view. The framework allows to classify the already existing variants, including the most recent ones like Chain-DD and ESRBDD, as implementations of a special class of ordered models. We enumerate, in a principled way, all the models of this class and isolate its most expressive model. This new model, termed $\lambda$DD-O-NUCX, is suitable for both dense and sparse Boolean functions, and is moreover invariant by negation. The canonicity of $\lambda$DD-O-NUCX is formally verified using the Coq proof assistant. We furthermore give bounds on the size of the different diagrams: the potential gain achieved by more expressive models can be at most linear in the number of variables n.