On the history of the book: In the early 1990s several new methods and
perspectives in au- mated deduction emerged. We just mention the
superposition calculus, meta-term inference and schematization,
deductive decision procedures, and automated model building. It was this
last ?eld which brought the authors of this book together. In 1994 they
met at the Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE-12) in Nancy and
agreed upon the general point of view, that semantics and, in
particular, construction of models should play a central role in the
?eld of automated deduction. In the following years the deduction groups
of the laboratory LEIBNIZ at IMAG Grenoble and the University of
Technology in Vienna organized several bilateral projects promoting this
topic. This book emerged as a main result of this cooperation. The
authors are aware of the fact, that the book does not cover all relevant
methods of automated model building (also called model construction or
model generation); instead the book focuses on deduction-based symbolic
methods for the construction of Herbrand models developed in the last 12
years. Other methods of automated model building, in particular also
?nite model building, are mainly treated in the ?nal chapter; this
chapter is less formal and detailed but gives a broader view on the
topic and a comparison of di?erent approaches. Howtoreadthisbook: In the
introduction we give an overview of automated deduction in a historical
context, taking into account its relationship with the human views on
formal and informal proofs.
