Computing Finite Models by Reduction to Function-Free Clause Logic

We propose to reduce model search to a sequence of satisfiability problems made of function-free clause sets, and to apply efficient theorem provers capable of deciding such problems on them. The main motivation for this method is the fact that first-order clause sets grow more slowly than their propositional counterparts, thus allowing for more space-efficient reasoning. We describe the method in detail, and show how it is integrated into Darwin, which is an implementation of the model evolution calculus. Although we used Darwin, the results are general, as our approach can be used in principle with every system that decides the satisfiability of function-free first-order clause sets