Variant real quantifier elimination: algorithm and application

International audienceWe study a variant of the real quantifier elimination problem (QE). The variant problem requires the input to satisfy a certain extra condition, and allows the ouput to be almost equivalent to the input. In a sense, we are strengthening the pre-condition and weakening the post-condition of the standard QE problem.The motivation/rationale for studying such a variant QE problem is that many quantified formulas arising in applications do satisfy the extra conditions. Furthermore, in most applications, it is sufficient that the ouput formula is almost equivalent to the input formula. Thus, we propose to solve a variant of the initial quantifier elimination problem.We present an algorithm (VQE), that exploits the strengthened pre-condition and the weakened post-condition. The main idea underlying the algorithm is to substitute the repeated projection step of CAD by a single projection without carrying out a parametric existential decision over the reals.We find that the algorithm VQE can tackle important and challenging problems, such as numerical stability analysis of the widely-used MacCormack's scheme. The problem has been practically out of reach for standard QE algorithms in spite of many attempts to tackle it. However the current implementation of VQE can solve it in about 1 day