# Abstract:

In the field of automatic proving, the study of the sets of prime implicants or implicates of a formula has proven to be very important. If we focus on non-classical logics and, in particular, on temporal logics, such study is useful even if it is restricted to the set of unitary implicants/implicates [P. Cordero, M. Enciso, and I. de Guzmán: Structure theorems for closed sets of implicates/implicants in temporal logic. (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 1695.) Springer-Verlag, Berlin 1999]. In this paper, a new concept we call { restricted ideal/filter} is introduced, it is proved that the set of restricted ideals/filters with the relation of inclusion has lattice structure and its utility for the efficient manipulation of the set of unitary implicants/implicates of formulas in propositional temporal logics is shown. We introduce a new property for subsets of lattices, which we call { groupability}, and we prove that the existence of { groupable} subsets in a lattice allows us to express restricted ideals/filters as the inductive closure for a binary non-deterministic operator and, consequently, the presence of this property guarantees a proper computational behavior of the set of unitary implicants/implicates.