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Project jbool_expressions

Build Status

jbool_expressions is a simple open-source library for creating and manipulating boolean expressions in java.

Example / Usage

A basic propositional expression is built out of the types And, Or, Not, Variable and Literal. All of these extend the base type Expression. For example,

    Expression<String> expr = And.of(
        Variable.of("A"),
        Variable.of("B"),
        Or.of(Variable.of("C"), Not.of(Variable.of("C"))));
    System.out.println(expr);

We see the expression is what we expect:

((!C | C) & A & B)

Simplification

Of course, this expression contains a useless term (either C or (! C) is always true.) We can simplify the expression, and see that the extra term is simplified out:

    Expression<String> simplified = RuleSet.simplify(expr);
    System.out.println(simplified);

outputs:

(A & B)

Variable Assignment

We can assign a value to one of the variables, and see that the expression is simplified after assigning "A" a value:

    Expression<String> halfAssigned = RuleSet.assign(simplified, Collections.singletonMap("A", true));
    System.out.println(halfAssigned);

outputs:

B

We can assign the last variable, and see that the expression resolves to a literal "true".

    Expression<String> resolved = RuleSet.assign(halfAssigned, Collections.singletonMap("B", true));
    System.out.println(resolved);

outputs:

true

All expressions are immutable (we got a new expression back each time we performed an operation), so we can see that the original expression is unmodified:

    System.out.println(expr);

outputs:

((!C | C) & A & B)

Input String Parsing

Alternatively, we could have provided our expression as a String in prefix notation and parsed it. We can verify that this expression is identical to the one we built manually:

    Expression<String> parsedExpression = RuleSet.simplify(ExprParser.parse("( ( (! C) | C) & A & B)"));
    System.out.println(parsedExpression);
    System.out.println(parsedExpression.equals(simplified));

output:

(A & B)
true

Converting to Disjunctive Normal (Sum-of-Products) Form

We can also convert expressions to sum-of-products form instead of just simplifying them. For example:

    Expression<String> nonStandard = ExprParser.parse("((A | B) & (C | D))");
    System.out.println(nonStandard);

    Expression<String> sopForm = RuleSet.toDNF(nonStandard);
    System.out.println(sopForm);

output:

((A | B) & (C | D))
((A & C) | (A & D) | (B & C) | (B & D))

Converting to Conjunctive Normal (Product-of-Sums) form

Likewise, we can convert an expression to product-of-sums form. For example:

    Expression<String> nonStandard = ExprParser.parse("((A & B) | (C & D))");
    System.out.println(nonStandard);

    Expression<String> posForm = RuleSet.toCNF(nonStandard);
    System.out.println(posForm);

output:

((A & B) | (C & D))
((A | C) & (A | D) & (B | C) & (B | D))

All of these examples can also be found in ExampleRunner

Rules

The current simplification rules define fairly simple and fast optimizations, and is defined in RuleSet. I'm happy to add more sophisticated rules (let me know about them via a PR or issue). The current rules include:

Literal removal:

(false & A) => false
(true & A) => A

(false | A) => A
(true | A) => true

Negation simplification:

(!!A ) => A
(A & !A) => false
(A | !A) => true

And / Or de-duplication and flattening:

(A & A & (B & C)) => (A & B & C)
(A | A | (B | C)) => (A | B | C)

Child expression simplification:

(A | B) & (A | B | C) => (A | B)
((A & B) | (A & B & C)) => (A & B)

Additional rules for converting to sum-of-products form:

Propagating &:

( A & ( C | D)) => ((A & C) | (A & D))

De Morgan's law:

(! ( A | B)) => ( (! A) & (! B))

Distribute law:

It applies Distributive property

(A & B | A & C) => (A & (B | C))
((A | B) && (A | C)) => (A | (B & C))

Downloading

jbool_expressions is available via maven central (check out Maven central for the latest version — the version below may not be the most recent):

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.bpodgursky</groupId>
    <artifactId>jbool_expressions</artifactId>
    <version>1.23</version>
</dependency>

Snapshot builds of jbool_expressions are also published to sonatype:

    <repository>
      <id>oss.sonatype.org-snapshot</id>
      <url>http://oss.sonatype.org/content/repositories/snapshots</url>
      <releases>
        <enabled>false</enabled>
      </releases>
      <snapshots>
        <enabled>true</enabled>
      </snapshots>
    </repository>

    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.bpodgursky</groupId>
        <artifactId>jbool_expressions</artifactId>
        <version>1.24-SNAPSHOT</version>
    </dependency>

Building

jbool_expressions is built with Maven. To build from source,

> mvn package

generates a snapshot jar target/jbool_expressions-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar.

To run the test suite locally,

> mvn test

Development

jbool_expressions is very much in-development, and is in no way, shape, or form guaranteed to be stable or bug-free. Bugs, suggestions, or pull requests are all very welcome.

License

Copyright 2013 Ben Podgursky

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0