We present a method to simplify expressions in the context of an equational theory. The basic ideas and concepts of the method have been presented previously elsewhere but here we tackle the difficult task of making it efficient in practice, in spite of its great generality. We first recall the notion of a collection of structures, which allows us to manipulate very large (possibly infinite) sets of terms as a whole, i.e., without enumerating their elements. Then we use this tool to construct algorithms to simplify expressions. We give various reasons why it is difficult to make these algorithms precise and efficient. We then propose a number of approches to solve the raised issues. Finally, and importantly, we provide a detailed experimental evaluation of the method and a comparison of several variants of it. Although the method is completely generic, we use (arbitrary, not only two-level) boolean expressions as the application field for these experiments because impressive simplifications can be obtained in spite of the hardness of the problem.

中文翻译：

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一种简化表达式的方法的实验评估

我们提出了一种在等式理论背景下简化表达式的方法。该方法的基本思想和概念之前已经在别处提出过，但在这里我们解决了使其在实践中高效的艰巨任务，尽管它具有很大的普遍性。我们首先回顾一下结构集合的概念，它允许我们将非常大的（可能是无限的）项集作为一个整体来操作，即，无需枚举它们的元素。然后我们使用这个工具来构造算法来简化表达式。我们给出了为什么难以使这些算法精确和高效的各种原因。然后我们提出了一些方法来解决提出的问题。最后，也是重要的，我们提供了该方法的详细实验评估及其几种变体的比较。