In this presentation, I will talk about the work I did during
my PhD thesis on the generation of prime implicates in equational
logic, i.e., the most general consequences of formulae containing
equations and disequations between first-order terms. I will
present the main result of this research, which is an algorithm
for generating prime implicates that relies on an extension of
the standard Superposition Calculus with rules that allow attaching
hypotheses to clauses as constraints to perform additional inferences.
The hypotheses that lead to a refutation represent implicates of
the original set of clauses. The set of prime implicates of a clausal
set can thus be obtained by saturation of this set up to redundancy.
I will also introduce the data structures and algorithms that were
devised to represent and manipulate sets of constrained clauses in
an efficient and concise way and a practical experimentation that
show the relevance of this method in comparison to existing
approaches for propositional and first-order logic.